30 Favorite Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts (opens in new tab)

My favorite keyboard shortcuts:

- CTRL + HYPHEN(-) for navigating backwards

- CTRL + SHIFT + HYPHEN(-) for navigating forwards

- CTRL + PERIOD(.) shows the smart tag, because almost nobody can hit that small rectangle with the mouse

- CTRL + SHIFT + F, Find in Files. I use this one quite often (mostly for a search in the entire solution); it's very fast and displays all the results in a separate window

- SHIFT + F12 (or CTRL + K, R) finds all references

On a sidenote: I've created a reference card including most of the VS keyboard shortcuts mentioned in the article and some more (I'm using it at work; looks pretty good printed). Too bad I didn't upload it yet. Looks like I'm going to publish it this evening on my journal.

Also of interest are:

Ctrl + K, D - Formats document

Ctrl + K, X - Opens snippet picker

Ctrl + Shift V - Pastes text from the Clipboard ring (did you know that Visual studio has clipboard ring? :)

Ctrl + R, M - Extracts method

F2 - rename identifier (and its references)

It's note to note that these seem to be implemented "ergonomically" rather than just by character.

On US keyboards, the opening bracket [ is easily available, while on e.g. Swedish keymaps you also need to press the Alt Gr key to get [ (it's at Alt Gr + 8).

Still, in Visual Studio the same physical key that is [ on US keyboards works as listed in this article, i.e. Control + å matches brackets. Nice!

It's interesting to see how many of the things that you used to only be able to do with ReSharper are now standard VS.NET features. Strange though that Microsoft didn't keep the ReSharper keyboard shortcuts when they adopted the features, especially since the R# ones are often a lot more intuitive.

CTRL+/ (and SHIFT+CTRL+/) to comment (and block comment) selections, for instance is so intuitive that you discover it by accident. Same with the variants on SHIFT+CTRL+SPACE for various smart-completion tasks. CTRL+. (VS.NET's shortcut for smart completion) is not something I'd ever think to try unless I already knew it.

Favorite, unless you use ReSharper.

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/documentation/ReSharper25...

"CTRL + :" then "of" -> focus the command line window then open file by name with completion. Great for navigating among files.

Shift + Delete is my favourite. It cuts the current line, which I use as an easy way to delete a whole line at a time.

For Unit Tests CTRL + R + T - debugs the current test. I always think to myself CTRL + Run + Test.

I always use the Ctrl + Period (.) and Ctrl + Hyphen (-)

ALT-F4 - close application immediately