My Favorite VS.NET Shortcuts

I’m a keyboard kind of guy. I hate it when I have to put my hands on the mouse – it
slows me way down. So it should be no surprise that I’m a fan of emacs – keystrokes
for everything. Still, I tend to use VS.NET, because it’s got a bunch of stuff that
I can’t get (yet) in emacs, like Intellisense and integrated debugging.

As a result, I’ve made an effort to learn VS.NET shortcut keys. I find myself often
pointing these out to fellow developers, especially when I’m suffering, watching them
laboriously navigate the menu system or type with one hand. Here are my favorites.
Some of these have already made the blogging rounds, but hopefully you’ll find at
least one gem in here

Key sequence	Command	Description
Ctrl-minus	Source “Back”	Works like your browser’s “back” button – takes you to the last line of code you were looking at, whether it’s in a different file or the file you’re currently in.
Ctrl-shift-minus	Source “Forward”	Works like your browser’s “forward” button. Opposite of ctrl-minus.
Ctrl-k Ctrl-k	Toggle bookmark	Adds or removes a bookmark to the current line. I use this one frequently when adding a using statement to the current file. Set a bookmark so I don’t lose my place, go to the top of the file (ctrl-home), add the using statement, then jump back to the bookmark.
Ctrl-k ctrl-n	Go to next bookmark	Navigates to the next bookmark. Because this gets annoying when there are lots of bookmarks in the file, I generally toggle the bookmark off as soon as I get back to it.
Ctrl-i	Incremental search	Incremental search is a great way to search really quickly: you type ctrl-i and then immediately start typing the word you’re looking for. As you type each letter, VS.NET will find the first instance of what you’ve typed so far. So, for example, if you’re looking for “foo”, you type ctrl-i, then “f”, and it will find the first instance of “f”. Then you type “o” and it will find the first instance of “fo”. If that’s “foo”, you’re done. If it’s “for” you can either type “o” again to look for “foo” or type ctrl-i again to look for the next instance of  “fo”. Emacs has had this forever, but it’s nice to have it in VS.NET, too.
Ctrl-a Alt-e v b	Select all, Untabify	Turns all tabs into spaces. Useful when I’m pasting code into an email or Word.
Ctrl-a Ctrl-k Ctrl-f	Select all, reformat	Ctrl-k ctrl-f will “reformat” the selection, making sure all the code is properly indented and even “fixing” which line the curly-braces appear on (you can set your definition of “correct” in VS.NET preferences).
Ctrl-k Ctrl-c	Comment selection	Puts “//” comments in front of whatever text is currently selected.
Ctrl-k Ctrl-u	Uncomment selection	Removes “//” comments from the front of whatever text is currently selected
Ctrl-J	List members	Pops up the Intellisense list that you normally get when you hit “.” after a variable. Very useful if you’ve navigated away from the list and you want to get it back.
Ctrl-shift-space	Parameter Info	Pops up the method information list you normally get when you hit “(“ after typing a method name in. I use this all the time, as I often start typing in the method’s parameters, then have to go do something else, like read the help. When I come back, this key sequence lets me pop up the completion list again.
F12	Browse definition	Jumps to the definition of whatever the cursor is on. Useful for when you’re thinking, “Umm, what does this method do?” Combine with ctrl-minus to jump right back to where you were.
F7	View code	VS.NET often insists on showing me the stupid designer view when what I want to see is the code. F7 shows me the code.
Shift-F7	View designer	Sometimes I actually do want to see the designer. This will show it to me when I’m in the corresponding code file.

Those are the main ones that I use day-to-day. There are many, many more – I find
it really useful to browse through the Tools->Customize->Keyboard dialog every
once in a while, looking for good ones (the keyboard shortcuts show up in “Shortcut(s)
for selected command”).