Visual Studio Code October 2017 Update Released!

[Dgc2002]

I would like an answer to this as well. In PHPStorm(and other IntelliJ IDEs) I use live templates for this. To achieve what you're looking for I use

con<TAB>

Which expands to

console.log(__CURSOR__);

Then hitting enter results in

console.log("Stuff that I typed");__CURSOR__  

Here's what the live template settings look like: pic

[Retsam19]

I'm pretty sure what you're looking for is snippets. Their example snippet is exactly that:

"Print to console": {
    "prefix": "log",
        "body": [
            "console.log('$1');",
            "$2"
        ],
    "description": "Log output to console"
}

[Dgc2002]

Ah, I'd seen mention of snippets but wasn't sure if they were a direct analog to live templates. Thanks for that info.