#56 Show Shortcut Keys in Visual Studio Toolbar Tooltips
Friday, February 20 2009
I try to use the keyboard exclusively in Visual Studio. Sometimes I don’t know (or have forgotten) the keyboard shortcut for something, but I know there is one. If you hover over the icon, on an icon bar, you’ll see the tooltip. If this tooltip doesn’t show up, or doesn’t have the keyboard shortcut in it, this video will show you how to turn them on.
[UPDATE FOR VS2010 Users]
This feature has been pulled from VS2010 - Check out tip #502 proving it, and get a little deeper understanding of how this works in 2008, with the registry settings.
Right-click on any toolbar or toolbar region to bring up the context menu, and select Customize. In the lower left-hand corner, select Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips. Now when you hover over a command, you'll see the keyboard shortcut in the tooltip (aka screen tip).
Visual Studio Tip / Trick #056 English Transcription:
Today's Visual Studio Trick of the Day No. 56 was original blog post by Sara Ford in October 2007.
The trick has to deal with the toolbar pop-ups and whether or not to display the pop-up or whether or not to include content in that pop-up that described the keyboard shortcut. So if you right-click on any of this open space in Visual Studio where a toolbar would normally go, you’ll get a customization menu. If you scroll down to the bottom of this, the very last item is Customize. And now we can use Large Icons, which most of don’t do as it takes a lot of real estate. Show the screen tooltips and if you have a keyboard binding to the same option the tooltip will do, will show you that keyboard shortcut as well. So let’s just turn that on and close. And as we hover over some of these toolbars, you can see some of these, [CRTL]+[SHIFT]+[K], [CRTL]+[SHIFT]+[N], something more simple like Save, [CRTL]+[S]. And I’ve confirmed that this works the same in Visual Studio 2005 as well as 2008.
Another trick I use is to map CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+? to the Tools.CustomizeKeyboard menu option. This immediately takes me to the Keyboard node in the Options dialog and I can either type out the description of a command I'm looking for the shortcut for, or I can type out the shortcut to find out what it does.
I find this extremely useful when I've completely forgotten my shortcut for something and need to quickly remember.
Thanks.
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2 comment(s)
Another trick I use is to map CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+? to the Tools.CustomizeKeyboard menu option. This immediately takes me to the Keyboard node in the Options dialog and I can either type out the description of a command I'm looking for the shortcut for, or I can type out the shortcut to find out what it does.
I find this extremely useful when I've completely forgotten my shortcut for something and need to quickly remember.
Thanks.