Most Useful Visual Studio 2008 Keyboard Shortcuts

I have started my career as a programmer learning (and loving) the Emacs editor; later I used for quite some time the VI editor on a remote server. It’s no wonder that I have become accustomed to use keyboard shortcuts extensively while editing my programs. Luckily, Visual Studio 2008 IDE that I now use on a daily basis comes with its own set of keyboard shortcuts that can make my programming hours more pleasant and productive.

My Favorite Shortcuts

I have tried to collect here the shortcuts I use dozens of times everyday.

I don’t fancy regions too much (I tend to prefer classes with few and short methods, so whenever I feel like I’d need regions to me that is a code smell); that’s why you won’t find them listed here. I also usually don’t care about shortcuts to handle files (new / open, etc…)  and adding items to a project, since I am usually quicker using the mouse there. But without further ado, her comes the list.

CTRL + K, C	Comment selection
CTRL + K, U	Uncomment selection
CTRL + K, D	Format document (according to the rules you have specified in Tools-Options->…)
CTRL + K, F	Format selection (according to the rules you have specified in Tools-Options->…)
CTRL + I	Incremental search (Emacs-like search)
CTRL + TAB	Cycle through the IDE windows
F12	Go to definition of symbol (class / interface / etc…)
SHIFT + F12	Find all references to this symbol (class / interface / etc…)
TAB	Insert the corresponding snippet
CTRL + ]	Move to the matching brace (for some reason this does not work when I use an Italian mapping for the keyboard)
CTRL + -	Move back to previous editing point(s).
F6	Build solution
SHIFT + F6	Build project
F5	Start debugger / Go to next breakpoint
SHIFT + F5	Quit debugger
F10	Debugger step over
F11	Debugger step in
SHIFT + F11	Debugger step out
CTRL + F10	Run to cursor
F9	Toggle breakpoint

Microsoft has a nice poster with the complete list of Visual Studio 2008 C# shortcuts. There are other shortcuts that I routinely use that are related to VS plug-ins (e.g. GhostDoc), but that is the topic for  another post.

Wish List

There are a few shortcuts that I’d love to have readily available in Visual Studio:

• join a line with the previous (J in VI)
• create an inline comment. That is, move the cursor to a specific column and insert a ‘//’ to start a new comment. (M-; in Emacs)
• format (wrap) multiline comments (M-q in Emacs)
• center screen at current line (CTRL+l in Emacs)
• an interactive replace mechanism (M-% in Emacs)