Visual Studio (2005,2008,2010) Tips and Tricks.
#6 Resize Tool Windows Using the keyboard
Monday, January 12 2009
Resizing internal floating windows in Visual Studio? Easy with the mouse right. Just a simple drag-n-drop. But for you keyboard fanatics, did you know you can resize floating windows from using keyboard shortcuts? This one will win bets in a Best of Visual Studio contest.
Snippets / Notes:
[ALT], [SPACE] = Context menu for floating window
Visual Studio Tip / Trick #006 English Transcription:
Today's VSTricks.com Trick No. 6 is a partial video repost from Sara Ford’s original trick, published on August 2, 2007.
Today's tip is Sizing Tool Windows with the keyboard. So this one was a little bit tricky for me because the way it’s written is [ALT] + [SPACE]. But if you do [ALT] + [SPACE], you get the application window, Visual Studio menu that pops up. When instead what you wanna do is actually do two independent key strokes. [ALT] and release, then [SPACE] bar and then it will give you the window that shows up just for the popup tool that you are working with. So now we have a Size option. And the first arrow that we select with our keyboard, (up, down, left or right), will dock to that part of the window. So now you are free to move that left and right. Now here you have another option, if you go up or down, you'll attach to that corner, and now you can adjust the window accordingly. If you press [ENTER], that will keep you new window shape or if you press [ESC], it will restore your window shape to what it was originally.
2 comment(s)
Hi Scott, you are the best!
I just saw your talk on tech-ed and I liked it a lot. After the talk I asked you how to resize the tool box window and this trick works fine if the tool box is floating.
But mine is not. The trick does not work on docked tool windows and it does not work for files shown i vertical tabs. All I want for x-mas is a way to do the resizing with the keyboard. By the way some of the keyboard short cuts are a bit hard to find if you use a danish keyboard as I do.
OK Steffen - I will look into this for you.