visual studio 2008 shortcuts

If you’re anything like me, then you tend to like keyboard shortcuts over the mouse.  Your mouse isn’t a very efficient way of getting around to be honest, but it takes time to learn all the keyboard shortcuts.  This was illustrated really well for me today when Anna went to download some files and copy them to a different machine on our network.  She downloaded them, then selected them all with the mouse, right clicked and then left clicked “cut” on the menu.  Then she navigated to the folder she was looking for, right clicked in the folder, then left clicked on “paste”.  It all makes perfect sense until you think that she could have selected the files with Ctrl-A, cut them with Ctrl-X and pasted them with Ctrl-V. 

The reason this isn’t so intuitive is that you need to move your hands out of the normal typing position in order to use the mouse.  When your hands are straight in front of you in typing position, typically the mouse is around 30cm to the right of your right hand.  That’s with a typical 104 key keyboard.  Check it out for yourself if you’re sitting at a desk right now.  Have a look how far to the right you need to move your hand to get to the mouse.  Now, when you’re navigating around an environment such as Visual Studio you’ll find that you can get things done a lot faster if you use only the keyboard as opposed to the combination of keyboard and mouse.  Of course there are exceptions, and things that are far more intuitive to do with a mouse than with a keyboard.  For the most part however you’ll be writing code.  It makes more sense for you to be able to do the job without having to break your train of thought with the additional movement necessary to get to the mouse.

Visual Studio has a myriad of hotkeys available, and the actual quantity varies on the version you are running.  I use the Pro version, in which there are five hundred and one shortcut keys.  The amount will depend on the version you are running.  For example, the Team System versions will have more for their SQL editor. That list is generated with the macro on Sara's page, which I won't publish again here for the sake of brevity.

If you are a programmer who uses VS.Net it would be very much worth your while taking some time each day to learn some of these macros. Over time you will build up a speed and knowledge of the IDE that simply cannot be matched with your mouse alone.

Sara Ford's WebLog : Did you know… There’s a macro for listing out all the keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio? - #370