30 Favorite Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

http://www.devcurry.com/2010/06/30-favorite-visual-studio-keyboard.html

by kadhinn • 16 years ago

19 17 16 years ago

devcurry.com

bunglebooz• 16 years ago

I always use the Ctrl + Period (.) and Ctrl + Hyphen (-)

unwind2• 16 years ago

It's note to note that these seem to be implemented "ergonomically" rather than just by character.

On US keyboards, the opening bracket [ is easily available, while on e.g. Swedish keymaps you also need to press the Alt Gr key to get [ (it's at Alt Gr + 8).

Still, in Visual Studio the same physical key that is [ on US keyboards works as listed in this article, i.e. Control + å matches brackets. Nice!

bad_user• 16 years ago

I just use the US layout, and when I press Right-Alt it switches to my native language's layout (which I can use efficiently because I can touch-type).

Just embrace English as the lingua franca of programming and you'll be better off.

unwind2• 16 years ago

Heh. I've certainly embraced that, for a good number of years. But that doesn't mean I need to use an English keymap, although I did fight that battle for a great while back on the Amiga, 15+ years ago. :)

yread• 16 years ago

Also of interest are:

Ctrl + K, D - Formats document

Ctrl + K, X - Opens snippet picker

Ctrl + Shift V - Pastes text from the Clipboard ring (did you know that Visual studio has clipboard ring? :)

Ctrl + R, M - Extracts method

F2 - rename identifier (and its references)

spoiledtechie2• 16 years ago

the clipboard ring doesn't seem to work too well.

johns2• 16 years ago

Really? Do you have some other clipboard manager installed? I never have any problems with it. Just keep hitting the shortcut over and over again to cycle through them. Sadly they removed the old toolbar that showed you everything on the ring.

gokhan• 16 years ago

Favorite, unless you use ReSharper.

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/documentation/ReSharper25...

giu2• 16 years ago

My favorite keyboard shortcuts:

- CTRL + HYPHEN(-) for navigating backwards

- CTRL + SHIFT + HYPHEN(-) for navigating forwards

- CTRL + PERIOD(.) shows the smart tag, because almost nobody can hit that small rectangle with the mouse

- CTRL + SHIFT + F, Find in Files. I use this one quite often (mostly for a search in the entire solution); it's very fast and displays all the results in a separate window

- SHIFT + F12 (or CTRL + K, R) finds all references

On a sidenote: I've created a reference card including most of the VS keyboard shortcuts mentioned in the article and some more (I'm using it at work; looks pretty good printed). Too bad I didn't upload it yet. Looks like I'm going to publish it this evening on my journal.

spoiledtechie2• 16 years ago

please do publish it...

giu2• 16 years ago

In case somebody's still interested in the cheat sheet, I just published it on my journal: http://giu.me/09-06-2010-visual-studio-2008-and-2010-default...

Google viewer: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgiu.me%2Ffile...

Direct link (PDF): http://giu.me/file/VisualStudio20082010DefaultKeyBindingsSim...

@spoiledtechie I've sent you the links via mail ;)

johns2• 16 years ago

This needs a little updating, but I've maintained this page forever: http://john-sheehan.com/blog/net-cheat-sheets

pcestrada• 16 years ago

ALT-F4 - close application immediately

rodh257• 16 years ago

Shift + Delete is my favourite. It cuts the current line, which I use as an easy way to delete a whole line at a time.

bmahloch• 16 years ago

For Unit Tests CTRL + R + T - debugs the current test. I always think to myself CTRL + Run + Test.

jasonkester• 16 years ago

It's interesting to see how many of the things that you used to only be able to do with ReSharper are now standard VS.NET features. Strange though that Microsoft didn't keep the ReSharper keyboard shortcuts when they adopted the features, especially since the R# ones are often a lot more intuitive.

CTRL+/ (and SHIFT+CTRL+/) to comment (and block comment) selections, for instance is so intuitive that you discover it by accident. Same with the variants on SHIFT+CTRL+SPACE for various smart-completion tasks. CTRL+. (VS.NET's shortcut for smart completion) is not something I'd ever think to try unless I already knew it.

ecaradec• 16 years ago

"CTRL + :" then "of" -> focus the command line window then open file by name with completion. Great for navigating among files.

30 Favorite Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

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