Visual Studio .NET has a number of useful features that are often underused by developers, because they are hidden under several menus and not easily accessible. Here is a list of keyboard shortcuts to some of these commands:
- Ctrl + – : moves the caret to its previous position.
- Ctrl + Shift + – : moves the caret to its next position (use it after Ctrl + -).
- Shift + Alt + Enter : toggles the full screen mode.
- Ctrl + G : jumps to the specified line of the current document.
- Ctrl + I : Incremental Search – as you press the first characters of the string you want to search, the cursor moves to the first occurrence found on the current document. The search is performed from the current line to the bottom. Ctrl + Shift + I works the same way, but the search is performed on the opposite direction, from the current line to the top of the current document.
- Alt + drag : creates rectangular selections of text, that you can copy, move, delete etc.
- Ctrl + Shift + V : iterates through the text snippets contained in the Clipboard Ring (to add a snippet just select the text and copy it by pressing Ctrl + C or the button on the toolbar). Keep Ctrl and Shift down and press V multiple times to select the snippet you want, and then release all the buttons to have the snippet pasted in the current position.
- Ctrl + R, Ctrl + R (twice) : toggles the word wrap mode for the VS.NET’s code documents. Useful when you have to read long blocks of code, and don’t want to continually scroll the document horizontally.
- Ctrl + L : deletes the current line after copying it to the clipboard. Ctrl + Shift + L and Shift + Del delete the current line without copying it to the clipboard.
