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 transpose characters, words, and lines in the editor? - #021

Transpose example

  • Press Ctrl+T to transpose a character
  • Press Ctrl+Shift+T to transpose a word
  • Press Alt+Shift+T to transpose a line

In the above example (where the cursor is placed before the "is" on the commented line "now is the time"),

  • Pressing Ctrl+T will swap the 'i' and the previous space, creating  // nowi s the time
  • Pressing Ctrl+Shift+T will swap the "is" and "the", creating // now the is time
  • Pressing Alt+Shift+T will swap the current line with the line below it

Just out of curiosity, I'd love to know how people use this feature, so please leave me a comment. 

Technorati tags: ,
Posted: Thursday, August 23, 2007 3:00 AM by saraford

Comments

twoelfer said:

Sara,

never used this. now that i know of it - still don't think i will use it.

WM_SORRY

-thomas woelfer

# August 23, 2007 6:28 AM

Asztal said:

I really only use this feature for fun (or press it by accident)...

I sometimes open a C++ program, go to the first line, and hold Ctrl-Shift-T until it's all been transposed. The output vaguely looks like a program, and I find it quite amusing :)

I guess Alt-Shift-T might be useful to me. But then again, I'm already pretty used to the whole "Ctrl-L Up Home Ctrl-V" business.

# August 23, 2007 7:28 AM

Henning said:

I use Ctrl+T quite often, because wrong order of charactes is a common typo for me.

Sometimes I try Ctrl+T in Outlook or Word - then remember that it's not VS :-)

# August 23, 2007 8:32 AM

Sarath said:

Sara,

It's really cool functionality. I doubt in the real world people using this functionality. What do you think?

# August 23, 2007 9:17 AM

Jason Haley said:

# August 23, 2007 10:13 AM

Alex Dresko said:

Hello! I'm a fellow keyboard junkie and I've never understood how this feature could be useful. I never really find myself needing to swap lines/words/characters like this. The closest I come to that is using CTRL+L to copy the current line to the clipboard and CTRL+V to place is back where I want it.

I'll be interested to see if anyone else comments on this one.

# August 23, 2007 10:16 AM

codekaizen said:

I've used it to reorder arrays of numbers. It was also big help converting from ARGB color value sequences to BGRA.

Hm, now that I think of it, I could have used this in a macro.

# August 23, 2007 11:12 AM

saraford said:

Henning:  I'm really curious how you use this to fix typos.  Can you share what your keyboard sequence is?  Is it something like,

1. type "stirng"  

2. arrow left a few times to the cursor is between 'i' and 'r'

3. press Ctrl+T

now that i'm thinking about it, this might actuall have fewer keystrokes then backspacing the entire work (or deleting the entire word) then retyping it.  I'll give it a try for a day =)

# August 23, 2007 12:26 PM

GregM said:

I use line transpose a lot for reordering lines.  It can be a lot easier than cut/paste at times, especially since you don't have to select the text or get the cursor into the right place for the paste.  It's especially helpful when I have something on the clipboard that I want to keep there for a minute while I rearrange lines.

I don't remember ever using word transpose, but I do use character transpose.  I started using those back in my Emacs days, using a terminal, so no mouse, and it was a LOT faster than cut/paste.

# August 23, 2007 2:02 PM

Peter Ritchie said:

Has to be one of my most used features.  It's unfortunate that it isn't completely language-aware though.  Often, when I use Ctrl+Shift+T I expect it to swap C# statements.  For example:

new int[] {method(1), method("text")};

                   ^

Placing the cursor before the comma and pressing Ctrl+Shift+T I usually expect the result to be:

new int[] {method("text"), method(1)};

instead of

new int[] {method(method), 1("text")};

# August 23, 2007 3:12 PM

Mike Dunn said:

I remap Ctrl+T to Edit.QuickInfo to match VC6. I never transpose text often enough to bother learning the keystrokes for it, I just cut/paste as needed.

# August 23, 2007 6:24 PM

Richard Sim said:

I use word transpose fairly frequently - mostly for mathematical expressions that I've messed up. As has already been pointed out, it's also useful for reordering arrays, enums, and anything similar.

# August 24, 2007 2:05 AM

codekaizen said:

I'm with Peter Richie - if it were also more language aware (swap statements, statement blocks or even methods) it would be much more useful.

# August 24, 2007 11:32 AM

Erik said:

I have only used it by accident up till now :)

# August 26, 2007 3:05 PM

NickV said:

I use transpose line frequently. Useful when wrapping some code in an "If ... End If" statement which the editor autocompletes. Using transpose line is a quick way to move the End If down below the code you want to wrap.

# October 11, 2007 11:15 PM

Visual Studio 2008 ワンポイント said:

文字を入れ替えるには、 Ctrl + T キーを押します。 単語を入れ替えるには、 Ctrl + Shift + T キーを押します。 行を入れ替えるには、 Alt + Shift + T キーを押します

# July 13, 2008 11:46 PM

Секреты Visual Studio said:

Нажмите Ctrl+T для переноса символа, Нажмите Ctrl+Shift+T для переноса слова, Нажмите Alt+Shift+T для

# August 8, 2008 6:21 AM

xjb said:

# December 5, 2008 6:53 AM

xjb said:

# December 7, 2008 9:27 AM
New Comments to this post are disabled
Page view tracker