CTRL+R is broken in VS Code

If you routinely work with VS Code you might be familiar with the CTRL + R shortcut. By default it is configured to open the "File: Open Recent..." window. This is especially handy, if you work on multiple projects in parallel and want to switch between them quickly.

However, this functionality broke for me recently, after reinstalling my notebook. As it turns out, the culprit was an extension: The eg2.vscode-npm-script extension which improves npm support for VS Code. So why did it break exactly? The extensions adds several new keyboard shortcuts. Some of them use chords including the CTRL + R keys. This stopped VS Code from accepting the CTRL + R shortcut, because it was waiting for the second part of a chord.

The authors of the extension (from Microsoft) recognized in hindsight, that this was a mistake and recommend in their README to remap the shortcut for these commands.

Now it is up to you to decide, if it is worth to keep the extension and remap the shortcuts or to remove it altogether. In my opinion it offers some interesting functionality, but can safely be removed, since VS Code offers great support for npm out of the box.

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