A few shortcuts that I use a lot are really basic, but very powerful. Frankly, I'm always surprised when I'm pairing with a co-worker and they don't know about them.
Cmd+p to open the fuzzy file finder search. This is a huge one and I'm shocked when I see people hunting through the file explorer to find the file they are looking for.
Cmd+shift+f to open the fuzzy workspace text search. Basically grep your workspace for code.
F1 or Cmd+p+> - Action menu. So many good actions in here from running formatters, to toggling light/dark mode, reload window, etc.
Ctrl+r (mac) - Fuzzy search for recently opened projects/files. Hitting Enter opens it in same window or Cmd+Enter opens in new window. I use this sooo much and most people don't know about it.
Cmd+n to open a new vscode window. Although I rarely use this as I almost always just use Ctrl+r.
VSCode has great fuzzy search and if you use it, it lets you move around your code and codebases so much faster.
Installing CLI tools so when in the terminal, you can run code <path> to open vscode at that working directory.
Can't remember the last time I used File->Open to open a new project window.
Cmd+b to open/close the left drawer
Cmd+shift+e to open the file explorer.
Have you looked into devcontainers? Could be a good option.
We use tilt right now for running the apps themselves. Haven’t delved into virtualized dev environments yet. We’re a Mac shop so we just have a list of brew commands to run. And for some critical tools they are invoked through docker so no cli install needed.
We have a file that houses the version and everything is done through a Makefile. So on the next main pull people will always invoke the correct version of a build tool.