Sara Ford's Weblog

There’s something about me that keeps hitting Ctrl+C instead of Ctrl+V whenever i’m on a blank line.  I just don’t understand it.  So, what happens is I copy a blank line, erasing the text i was trying to paste right there.  And to my dismay...

You know you’ve thought about it at some point it time… "where’s the Ctrl+F to search for something in the book you are reading."  Sorry, there’s no Ctrl+F in books.

You’ll find the Undo and Redo stacks on the standard toolbar.  Just make sure the cursor is in a text editor to enable these toolbars. Instead of having to press Ctrl-Z or Ctrl-Y multiple times to undo multiple commands, you can drop down the Undo...

Ctrl+K, Ctrl+A will swap the current anchor position.  For whatever reason, when i tested our Emacs Emulations, i used this functionality all the time whenever I wrote test case code.  But i never use it in the default editor settings. ...

Ctrl+L , bound to Edit.LineCut, will cut the current line, including EOL. Ctrl+Shift+L , bound to Edit.LineDelete, will delete the current line, including EOL. and for our bonus keyboard shortcut of the day… Shift+Delete will cut the current line, including...

Ctrl+PageUp will jump the cursor to the top of the current editor view without moving the current view.  (if you were to just press PageUp, the current editor view would jump up an entire page). Ctrl+PageDown will jump the cursor to the bottom of...

[a blog reader let me know that i had reversed preceding and proceeding. But the title is correct now  I was obviously way too focused on drawing a nice tree.] I knew about Ctrl+Backspace, but Ctrl+Delete was a "oh yeah, i forgot about that"...

Writing tip of the day is *really* time consuming. So, today's extra post is a "go sara go" post. If you like Tip of the Day, please just leave me a quick comment, even if it is just "go sara go". I really, really helps me keep going when I get emails...

After yesterday’s tip on how Navigate Forward, Navigate Backward, and go-back markers work, did you know you can select text up to the last go-back marker?  It is bound to Ctrl+= and the command name is Edit.SelectToLastGoBack (say that 5 times fast...

I’m hoping this pop quiz is a little more challenging. Below is a picture of the right portion of the File Tab Channel.  I’ve circled the drop down button that drops down the list of open files. Now, under what condition does the icon change to having...

In the standard toolbar, there’s the Navigate Backward and Navigate Forward buttons. In the editor, the Navigate Backward is bound to Ctrl+minus and Navigate Forward is bound to Ctrl+Shift+minus.  I find these commands most helpful when navigating...

Pretty straight-forward, pressing Ctrl+G will pop up the Go to line dialog. But, did you know there’s a way to do a "Ctrl+G" without bringing up this dialog box? Press Ctrl+D to go to the Ctrl+D window Type in the line number Press Ctrl+G (not...

6 years is like going from being 12 years old to starting college or going from a college freshmen to a master’s degree.  Or going from 23 to 29.  6 years is a long time.  (i’m just in a little shock right now). Why couldn’t i have started...

The tip before this tip is that you can press down on the mouse wheel and have it act as a 3rd button.  For many applications with an editor, this will display an icon indicating which directions you can scroll in.  Some require holding down...

Today’s tip truly embraces the spirit of "Did you know?"  Go to Tools – Options – Text Editor – General , and under Display, check Vertical scroll bar or Horizontal scroll bar. And yes, you can still scroll both vertically and horizontally...

Obviously I’m not at work at 3am posting tip of the day (although i’ve had a nightmare that i forgot to write a tip and I broke my consecutive series).  I’m currently writing tips for a feature set very near and dear to my heart… Window Management...

Yesterday’s tip was everything you ever wanted to know about outlining in the editor.  Today, we’ll explore an outlining customization. Go to Tools – Options – Text Editor – General , and uncheck Selection Margin.  Although the left-margin that...

Yesterday’s tip talked about how to cut a collapsed block of code, but how do you collapse a block of code anyways? There are basically five commands for "outline toggling," which can be found on the Edit – Outlining menu . #1 – Toggle Outlining...

Following yesterday’s tip theme of code relocation, you can cut and paste a collapsed block of code, keeping all of the code inside intact.  Of course, this is exactly what you would expect, but I never thought about trying it.  With a block...

I tend to be more of a keyboard user, probably because I’m too lazy to reach all that way for the mouse.  When I first saw this functionality, I was surprised because it is just not something i would intuitively think of, but of course it makes completely...

Press Ctrl+W at any location on the word to select the entire word.  You can have the cursor at the end of word and still have it select the current word (instead of the proceeding whitespace.)  If the cursor is in the middle of whitespace ...

Again, it’s all about the simple things in life. Go to Tools – Options – Environment – Fonts and Colors, in Display items select Plain Text.  Now, set Item foreground to White and Item background to Black .  And enjoy!. In the above snapshot...

I call out the bookmark color, since it appears at the top of the Fonts and Colors Display Items list.  But, this tip applies to all items that appear in the indicator margin, like current statement, breakpoints, etc, but let’s focus on bookmarks...

Go to File – Page Setup .  In the lower left-hand corner, there’s a Page header option.  This option will put the file path across the top of the printed file. Technorati tags: VS2005Tip , VS2008Tip

I apologize for the title. I think we all at one point in time have tried to customize our editor colors or change keywords to bold or something, and then press the Print button.  And, we arrive at the printer confused that our changes haven’t been...