Visual Studio Shortcuts

In my post Diagnosing Process Crashes, or, What To Do When Computers Choose To Hate Us I wrote in passing about knowing how to use the correct tools to solve the problem in hand. However, knowing which tool best solves a problem does not necessarily mean that we know how to use that tool efficiently.

I use Visual Studio nearly every day, and have done for the last 15 years. I certainly know enough about using it to get by, but there’s always more to learn. One of the most rewarding things about pair programming is watching someone nonchalantly use a magical combination of keys to effortlessly achieve something that I’d do in a slower, more manual way.

If you don’t have a pairing pal to learn from, fear not. Mads Kristensen maintains visualstudioshortcuts.com, a site that lists the default shortcuts for recent versions of Visual Studio. He’s also published the engine for the site as a marketplace extension; this extension outputs all the shortcuts currently configured on the installed instance of VS.

Plenty for me to learn from there. In the meantime, I will continue to petition for a new public holiday to commemorate the day I discovered how to concurrently edit multiple lines using the Line Down Extend Column shortcut…