Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Sara Ford's Weblog

My adventures embracing open source on CodePlex and at Microsoft

News

    • Did you know... All author proceeds go directly to sending Hurricane Katrina survivors to college.

      Microsoft Visual Studio Tips book

      Recent Entries

Did you know… how to enable Visible White Space?

Another simple little feature, but very powerful, especially when you deal with white space as much as I do.  The first time I saw a developer using it, it thought, “Yuck”, but now I’m addicted, even when I’m not testing white space in a file.

 

To enable in both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, go to

Edit – Advanced – View White Space

 

Note: this option is only available when there’s a file open, but the option state will persist across files and VS sessions.

 

Posted: Monday, March 21, 2005 10:20 AM by saraford

Comments

Mike Dunn said:

This has been around since VC6 actually, and the keyboard shortcut is the same as in Word: Ctrl+* (Ctrl+Shift+8 on US keyboards).
# March 21, 2005 1:49 PM

Luis Lobo Borobia said:

I used to be addicted to that feature, but in Word 5 for DOS! Nowadays I usually do VB6 programming, without any option like that (anyway i don't think VB6 ide has that option)
# March 21, 2005 6:21 PM

Ian Griffiths said:

Or you can use the 'chord' sequence Ctrl-R, Ctrl-W. For some reason I find that easier to remember - the W reminds me of whitespace. Not so sure on the R...

Why are sequences of keystrokes called chords? I've been playing the piano on and off since I was 5, and 'chords' are the ones where you hit several keys at the same time. Shouldn't these sequence-like ones be called 'scales'?
# March 23, 2005 3:30 PM

Travis Owens said:

This is actually pretty neat feature I wasn't aware of. Actually I wasn't aware of the whole "Edit > Advance" section.

After setting the White Space color to a very faint grey/off white, it became much easier on the eyes.

Perhaps you should update this entry and remind people they can set the color to this in case the default dark green is too invasive.
# March 30, 2005 8:14 AM

GJR said:

Do the new editions of VS allow you to set the colors (or 'characters') of white space and virtual space to different values (as Codewright an other editors do) so that you can clearly see the 'shape' of code etc??
# March 31, 2005 6:22 PM
New Comments to this post are disabled
Page view tracker