Windows Keymap (PCMode)

Windows-style keyboard shortcuts for VS Code on macOS — the companion extension to PCMode, same idea as the "Sublime Text Keymap" or "Atom Keymap" extensions.

PCMode remaps a lot of Mac keyboard behavior system-wide to feel more like Windows, but it fully excludes VS Code from that (see the main repo's README) — an OS-level event tap can't tell VS Code's editor apart from its own integrated terminal, and guessing wrong there means either breaking Ctrl+C-as-SIGINT in the terminal or never getting the remap in the editor.

VS Code's own keybinding system doesn't have that problem: its "when" context clauses (terminalFocus, editorTextFocus, terminalTextSelected) know exactly where focus is, from inside the app. So this extension does the same job VS Code's own Windows build does for itself — rebinding every command whose default keybinding differs between Windows and macOS to its Windows chord — instead of asking PCMode to guess from the outside.

What it does

Rebinds ~100 commands to their Windows-default keystroke: Quick Open, cut/copy/paste/select-all, multi-cursor and column selection, panel toggles (Explorer, Search, Debug, Extensions, …), editor-group navigation, folding, find/replace, and the integrated terminal's own copy/paste/scroll shortcuts.

Shortcuts that are already identical on both platforms (most F-keys, Alt+Up/Down to move a line, Cmd/Ctrl+ for the terminal, etc.) are left alone — seepackage.json's contributes.keybindings` for the full list, grouped by section to match Microsoft's own keyboard shortcut reference.

The integrated terminal's Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V mirror Windows' actual behavior exactly: Ctrl+C copies only when text is selected, and otherwise falls through as literal SIGINT (so git commit still stops on Ctrl+C); Ctrl+V always pastes, which does shadow readline's rarer "quoted insert" binding — same tradeoff Windows itself makes.

Install

From the Marketplace (recommended, auto-updates): Extensions view → search "Windows Keymap (PCMode)" → Install, or:

code --install-extension burtonrodman.windows-keymap

From a local build:

cd vscode-windows-keymap
npx @vscode/vsce package
code --install-extension windows-keymap-*.vsix

Reload VS Code (Cmd+Shift+P → "Developer: Reload Window") afterward.

To uninstall: Extensions view → search "Windows Keymap" → Uninstall.

Known caveats

A handful of Windows shortcuts collide with macOS shortcuts that live outside VS Code, at the OS level — no app, including this one, can override these from a keybindings contribution:

• Ctrl+Up / Ctrl+Down are Mission Control/Spaces shortcuts by default on macOS. The scroll-line bindings that use them will silently do nothing until you turn those off in System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control (or accept that macOS wins). This extension can't fix that from inside VS Code — no keybindings contribution can out-race an OS-level hotkey.
• Ctrl+Left / Ctrl+Right are the same Mission Control/Spaces collision, but PCMode itself solves this one from outside the app: it remaps Ctrl+Left/Right to Option+Left/Right (word navigation) in its own event tap, ahead of Mission Control's own dispatch — the one PCMode keyboard remap that still applies in VS Code despite it otherwise being fully excluded (see the main repo's README). Only relevant if you're running this extension without PCMode (e.g. on someone else's Mac): in that case Ctrl+Left/Right will silently do nothing, same as Ctrl+Up/Down above, until Mission Control's shortcuts are turned off.
• F11 (Toggle Full Screen) may be claimed by Mission Control's "Show Desktop" binding, or by media-key/Fn behavior on laptop keyboards.

One entry, plain Ctrl+A → Select All, is bound to editor.action.selectAll as a best guess — Cmd+A already works natively via Electron's own Edit-menu handling, so this repo hasn't been able to confirm that command id resolves to anything in every context. If it's a no-op for you, open the Keyboard Shortcuts editor (Cmd+K Cmd+S), search "select all" in the command column to find the real id, and fix the entry in package.json — or just delete it, since Cmd+A likely already works without it.

Why an extension instead of a keybindings.json you paste in

A personal keybindings.json works too, and is easier to tweak by hand. This is packaged as an extension instead because it's easier to install, update, and uninstall cleanly (no merge-by-hand into a file that might already have your own customizations), and it travels with you across machines via Settings Sync if you use that.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.