Archives for February 2009

If you’re crazy about dropping bookmarks in your project, then you’ll love this ability to manage them. There’s a Bookmark Tool Window (or Panel) that allows you to organize and arrange your bookmarks. You can create one or many folders with name, and then jump between bookmarks just in that folder. Once you’ve organized your bookmarks, you can use similar bookmark navigation keyboard shortcuts to navigate within the folder by adding the Shift button to the chord. 

[CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[K], [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[P] to move to the previous bookmark in the folder.

[CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[K], [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[N] to move to the next bookmark in the folder.

Trick number #30 also talked about Bookmarks, but this time I go into a little more detail as to why your keyboard bindings might be different than what you’re seeing in the video. The short version is that you probably chose Visual Basic or Visual C# when you installed Visual Studio and each of these has a different set of keyboard binding. The video shows you how to figure out your bindings, and spends a little more time on the bookmarking system built into Visual Studio.

[CTRL]+[K], [CTRL]+[K] to toggle a bookmark.
This command is bound to Edit.ToggleBookmark, if your keybindings are different

[CTRL]+[K], [CTRL]+[N] (Edit.NextBookmark) to navigate to the next bookmark

[CTRL]+[K], [CTRL]+[P] (Edit.PreviousBookmark) to navigate to the previous bookmark

[CTRL+[K], [CTRL]+[L] (Edit.ClearBookmarks)

All of these commands can be found at Edit | Bookmarks

And also found on the Text Editor Toolbar.  Note that on the Text Editor Toolbar, as mouse-over below, the Previous Bookmark in Document and Next Bookmark in Document don’t have keyboard shortcuts bound to them, but they are listed on the text editor toolbar.

In VS 2005, we introduced Emacs and Brief emulations into the editor.  Go to Tools – Options – Environment – Keyboard, and then drop down the Apply the following additional keyboard mapping scheme:  Choose either Brief or Emacs.

This is enabled by default for most editors, but just in case you’re not able to click on a URL, here’s what you do.  Go to Tools – Options – Text Editor – All Languages – General, and click on Enable single-click URL navigation.

You can cycle through the past 20 items you’ve either cut or copied onto the clipboard via Ctrl+Shift+V.  Pretty cool, huh? As an added bonus for users of Visual Studio 2005, on the View menu, there is the option to view your Clipboard ring, which shows up as a list in your Toolbox. That visual has been removed for 2008, and as far as I can tell, hasn’t returned for Studio 2010.