In VS 2015 I'm getting a weird brace highlighting effect. Using the Dark theme, I'm getting a light gray box around the pair of braces, parens, or quotation marks when I place the cursor after the closing token.
I though that this was a plugin, but I disabled both CodeRush and Productivity Power Tools and it is still happening.
I thought that VS 2013 did the same thing, but I can't remember how to turn it off.
Tools -> Options
Environment -> Fonts and Colors
Brace Matching: Set foreground and background to "Automatic".
No need to change Brace Matching (highlight) or Brace Matching (rectangle)
In Notepad++ for example when your cursor is next to a brace it will highlight the corresponding opening or closing brace on screen.
Check out the link below for a example as to what I mean.
http://www.atmel.com/webdoc/visualassist/visualassist._match.html
How can Visual Studio do this?
The Visual Studio 2013 C# editor has brace highlighting. Place the cursor on the outside of the brace, (not the inside) to see the highlight.
The default color is very subtle, use the Tools\Options\Fonts And Colors setting to apply a different highlight color.
I am using Visual Studio 2012 RC with a dark background in the editor. I am NOT using the dark color theme. I am using the light theme. When I set a breakpoint, the text changes to black and I can't see it. I unchecked “Highlight entire source line for breakpoints and current statement.” setting under 'Debugging'. In "Fonts and Colors" all the entries for 'breakpoint' and 'current statement' do not have a dark color for both foreground and background colors.
Where is the setting for this or is this a bug in VS?
You can change the font color to white in Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Fonts and Colors -> Breakpoint (enabled). That won't restore syntax highlighting, though.
Still can't turn it off properly in VS2019 but there is hope in the form of an github issue. Go thumb it up & subscribe: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/39114
You can change the color as mentioned above, but this will lose the syntax highlighting.
check Options - Text Editor - General - Indicator Margin.
It should be checked, so Visual Studio can place the marker.
When I moved from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010, there seems to only be a small section of pointing space (for the mouse) to click and drag and click again, to grab a few lines of code. This is about 8 pixels wide and is referred to as the Selection Margin. I often used this area in Visual Studio 2008 to select/copy/paste code. Now I have to rely on using the keyboard, which is not difficult, but if I'm using the mouse, Visual Studio is not very intuitive or usable. Is there a way to prevent the highlighting of lexical groups (where the expand/collapse or plus/minus sections are) so I can just select the lines of code instead? They seem to call this block highlighting. Most of the surface area to the left of the text in Visual Studio 2010 seems to be dedicated to the block highlighting. The text editor freezes when a lexical block of code is highlighted and I cannot use the right context menu. The right context menu is also only available from inside the text editor now, so I have to select my lines in that 8 pixel region, then move my mouse over to the right to copy. My productivity in Visual Studio 2010 has decreased substantially because of this change.
I'm wondering if anyone has written any extensions with the Visual Studio 2010 editor to fix these issues?
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/WriteExtensions.aspx
Options > Text Editor > All Languages > Show line numbers. This allows you to have more space to select and copy the lines, but you still must go over to the right (where the code is) to copy.
Have you tried to select in a so called 'Continuous Stream Mode' which is supported by VS 2010 by default? Here's what I mean -> Hold down the SHIFT key and click in the Selection Margin(located at the far left of the Editor window, to select a whole line.) to extend your selection line by line.
Regards,
Evgenia
Where are the settings to show a space, tab, paragraph, CRLF, etc. (extended) characters?
Edit > Advanced > View White Space. The keyboard shortcut is CTRL+R, CTRL+W. The command is called Edit.ViewWhiteSpace.
It works in all Visual Studio versions at least since Visual Studio 2010, the current one being Visual Studio 2019 (at time of writing). In Visual Studio 2013, you can also use CTRL+E, S or CTRL+E, CTRL+S.
By default, end of line markers are not visualized. This functionality is provided by the End of the Line extension.
Edit -> Advanced -> View White Space or Ctrl+R,Ctrl+W for Visual Studio 2019
Display white space characters
Menu:
You can toggle the visibility of the white space characters from the menu:
Edit > Advanced > View White Space.
Button:
If you want to add the button to a toolbar, it is called Toggle Visual Space in the command category "Edit".
The actual command name is: Edit.ViewWhiteSpace.
Keyboard Shortcut:
In Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 the default keyboard shortcut still is CTRL+R, CTRL+W
Type one after the other.
All default shortcuts
End-of-line characters
Extension:
There is a minimal extension adding the displaying of end-of-line characters (LF and CR) to the visual white space mode, as you would expect. Additionally it supplies buttons and short-cuts to modify all line-endings in a document, or a selection.
VisualStudio gallery: End of the Line
Note: Since Visual Studio 2017 there is no option in the File-menu called Advanced Save Options. Changing the encoding and line-endings for a file can be done using Save File As ... and clicking the down-arrow on the right side of the save-button. This shows the option Save with Encoding. You'll be asked permission to overwrite the current file.
My problem was hitting CTRL+F and space
This marked all spaces brown. Spent 10 minutes to "turn it off" :P
The correct shortcut is CTRL-R-W like you don't have to release CTRL button while pressing W. This worked for me in VS 2015
For those who are looking for a button toggle:
The name of this command is View white space in GUI menu (Edit -> Advanced -> View white space).
The name of this command in the Add command popup is Toggle Visual Space.
If you use Visual Studio Code => View => Render Whitespace
That's it!
For me this setting was on, but didn't work. I had to turn it off and on again and than it worked! So this is a bug in Visual Studio Code!
If you use Visual Studio 2022 you can change the display options for whitespace etc. in Tools => Options => Text Editor => General and select "View whitespace"
The shortcut didn't work for me in Visual Studio 2015, also it was not in the edit menu.
Download and install the Productivity Power Tools for VS2015 and than you can find these options in the edit > advanced menu.
To see the CRLF you can try this extension: End of the Line
It works for VS2012+
For Visual Studio for mac, you can find it under Visual Studio -> Preferences -> Text Editor -> Markers and Rulers -> Show invisible characters
Please note you may need to restart Visual Studio for the changes to take effect
For completeness since I haven't seen it mentioned here, it is also in Options->Text Editor->General->View Whitespace.
In the actual version this Option ist under Editor: Render Whitespace