I got tired of manually dragging to select code or relying on triple-click line selection, so I built a VS Code extension that highlights the current syntactic block on hover. Once highlighted, press Alt+Enter to select it, then Alt+Up / Alt+Down to expand or shrink up and down the code blocks

Features:

Hover to highlight the current code block Alt+Enter to select, Alt+Up/Down to navigate the tree Alt+Shift+H to toggle highlighting Status bar shows the current AST node type Configurable highlight color, status bar visibility, and enabled languages