Code Editor Tips: hover with the keyboard

2025-05-07

In my never ending quest to minimise the use of the mouse while I write code, I discovered a shortcut I can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone use in front of me. I’m sure this is trivial in Vim, this is a tip for mere mortals.

You know when you want to peek the type of a variable or the signature of a function. What do you do? Hover over the symbol with the mouse, completely breaking your typing flow. Not anymore! Turns out you can trigger the hover action with the Show or Focus Hover command or with the chord ⌘K ⌘I.

This pairs really well with the Go to symbol command (⌘+Shift+O) to quickly go to the symbol you want to hover over (using the arrows is the new using the mouse).

This works in VS Code, Zed and Cursor as far as I know. I’m sure other IDEs have it too.