In Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, these buttons that have always been extremely useful and convenient, are now always disabled. Why?
(Center, Alignment, Send to Back and Send to Front etc buttons.)
They work just fine. The alignment and spacing toolbar buttons require you to select more than one control before they can do their job. It is fairly obvious from your screenshot that you've only got a single control selected. Hold down the Ctrl key and click the other controls that you want to align or space. The last 2 buttons (Bring to Front/Send to Back) require having more than one control on your form. Again, no evidence in your screenshot that you have more than the one.
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I am unable to perform multi-file text search and replace (in Visual Studio).
In the past, when I opened the "Replace in Files" dialog, there were 4 buttons in the lower right. One of the bottom two buttons allowed me to "Replace All".
The two lower buttons (including "Replace All") are no longer present.
I believe this occurred after I changed some Windows settings so that I could use menus without the Magnifier.
It is not just a matter of the buttons being off-screen because the window is too large (although it is too large - they would be off-screen, if they were present).
I can drag the window and see the bottom, even though the top is then off-screen (I use AltWindowDrag, allowing me to hold the ALT key, and drag by any part of the window, not just the title bar).
The two lower buttons are not present. I'm unable to resize the window - when I try, nothing happens, or the window repositions so that I can see the title bar, but can no longer see the bottom.
The two buttons that are still present (Find Next and Replace) don't have keyboard shortcuts, so I presume that Replace All doesn't either. Nor can I select either of those two buttons using Tab, so probably can't select an "invisible" "Replace All" button that way.
Any help appreciated.
You can use Find and Replace by pressing Ctrl+H and to Replace All just use Alt+A.
when selecting large swaths of text from webpage I have to keep left mouse button pressed while searching for the selection's end. It would be nice if the browser would "remember" selection's start point and let me search for the ending point, e.g. by dragging the scrollbar downwards, without pressing the mouse button.
Does a plugin or other implementation of this sort already exist?
The answer to this is OS/Windowing system specific. In most/all systems there is a normal way to have the system perform what you are desiring. An add-on for Firefox is not required.
Windows:
If you click (button down and up, not button down and hold) at the start, or the end of the selection you desire then move the mouse to the other end of the desired selection (scrolling the page as needed to get the the other end) you can then hold the shift key down and click again. This will select the entire region from the first point you clicked to the second point you clicked while holding the shift key. You can adjust the selection by continuing to hold the shift key while doing any of: clicking on a different location, performing a click-drag movement, or using the keyboard cursor keys. This adjustment does not change the point at which you first clicked, just the second, end point.
It is also possible to use the control key to select individual items. This is possible in combination with clicks, double-clicks, and triple-clicks. An example would be to move your mouse around in this paragraph holding the ctrl key down while double-clicking on various words. Your selection will include just the words on which you double-clicked. In some instances, when using only a single ctrl-click to select from a discrete list (e.g. a Windows Explorer folder display), a second ctrl-click on the same item will de-select it. You can also combine the use of ctrl-click and shift-click to create more complex selections with the beginning of the shift-click selection starting at the most recent ctrl-click location.
The Mouse and Pointers page in the Windows Dev Center provides some fairly technical descriptions as guidelines for Windows developers.
Linux (using GNOME):
The interactions are similar to What was described for Windows, but a bit different. Section 10.1.2. Selecting Objects of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 2.2.3 provides a good description.
Apple/OSX:
The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines describes how selections can be made on Apple machines.
In Visual Studio 2013, is it possible to change the keyboard shortcut for switching the overload on the Parameter Info popup to something other than up and down arrows?
For example, when you type:
System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Matches(
A little box pops up telling you about overload 1 of 3 for that method. Pressing the down arrow will go to 2 of 3 etc. As a point of fact, the up and down arrows already serve the nifty function of moving the cursor. When that box is visible, you have to hit escape to get the up and down arrows back to their normal behavior.
My question is this, can you change the Parameter Info box up + down keyboard shortcuts to be something else, like control up or down?
I did notice that the left and right arrow keys might be a bit better than the escape key, but I'd still prefer to remap the up and down behavior so they can make the box go away.
I realized how much time (and hand movement) I spend hitting the escape and figured it'd be worth asking. I do not think this falls under the category of the keyboard shortcuts that you can remap from the Options screen.
Many thanks!
I have a long line that I want to select a section in the middle. In Visual Studio, it would scroll all the way to the end of the line, passing where I want the selection to end, when I move pass the text area and move all the way back when I try to move back a little. Is there a way to slow down the Visual Studio scrolling adjustment?
If you are talking about selecting text using the mouse you can get fine grained control by combining the the mouse and keyboard. This should work in any application that allows text selection, not just Visual Studio.
First click the location where you want to begin selecting text.
Next scroll to the location where you want to end selecting text and hold down Shift on the keyboard while clicking with the mouse. The block of text between the first click and the shift+click will be selected without having to worry about the selection jumping around due to scrolling.
As for actually slowing down the scrolling; I know of no way to do that. Hopefully my tip should give you an alternate way to do what you actually want.
Is it possible to change the width of the text editor in VS2012 - I've got a fairly wide screen and use fairly small text so I end up with a lot wasted real-estate in the middle of my screen.
I don't want to turn off word wrap - I just want the wrap to start further right on the line. If that makes sense!?
You can set this with HTML in Visual Studio 2012 but there is no global setting and it's missing in quite a few languages.
You can just put another "dummy" window next to the one you are writing in, so the actual editor window will be smaller. You can put it on the left if you want to pan the text to the right, and to the right if you want to shorten the lines.
I actually found the answer elsewhere; VS doesn't appear to provide this functionality but Resharper does. Resharper -> Options -> Code Editing -> C# -> Formatting Style -> Line Breaks and Wrapping -> Right margin (columns)
I put mine to 200 which fixed the issue
I know that this is not what you are looking for, but I believe it solves the same problem. I too have a fairly large screen and try to make use of it as optimally as possible.
I hate tabbing between code or design tabs and try to avoid that as much as possible.
VS has a feature that permits the user to create Horizontal or Vertical Tab groups and ever since I have started using it, I have found it very helpful. These options are present in the context menu by right clicking the tab or in the VS Window Menu (Menus are seen only if the tab groups feature is not active).
I have created a screenshot with Vertical Tab Groups created as shown below. In this example, I have a overview of both the designer and the code view at the same time.
We can use tab groups whenever there is a dependency such as comparing code, redesigning a module, etc. I know it takes a little time to get used to this feature but try it out and see :)