In Visual Studio 2010, the general format of Intellisense/Tooltips is radically altered after installing the Productivity Power Tools. In my opinion, the change severely harms productivity. The below images show the before and after:
With Productivity Power Tools Uninstalled/Disabled:
With Productivity Power Tools Installed/Enabled:
What is the option that I need to disable within Productivity Power Tools to turn this off? I like some of the tools but definitely dislike this particular one. I've tried toggling all of the obvious ones but can't seem to find the correct one.
Note: this question is asking about a similar issue but the accepted answer seems totally irrelevant.
The option you are looking for is called Solution Navigator.
You can get to this option by clicking the "Tools" menu in Visual Studio and selecting "Options...". Scroll down the left pane until you see "Productivity Power Tools". Select it. You will see a bunch of On/Off switches. Scroll down the right pane until you see "Solution Navigator". Turn it off and restart Visual Studio. It took me forever to identify the culprit and I hope this answer will save others some precious time.
Solution Navigator seems like it wouldn't be the culprit but the documentation states:
Solution Navigator also provides interactive tooltips in C# and VB
code (replacing the default “quick info” tooltips) that give you the
same kind of data, but right at your fingertips.
It's a shame that you can't disable just the tooltips, it's all or nothing. The solution navigator itself is actually kind of nifty.
If you go into the settings for the Productivity Power Tools (Tools > Options > Productivity Power Tools) there is a node called Solution Navigator. In that node there is an "Enable interactive tooltips" option. Make sure that is unchecked to disable the Power Tools tool tips and get the normal Visual Studio tool tips back.
colithium's answer is what led me to find this setting. I'm using version 10.0.20626.18, I'm not sure if that is the case in earlier versions.
Related
In Visual Studio 2015 Pro, all of a sudden whichever editor window I have active, its tab moves to the leftmost position.
It must have been some key combination I hit and I can't figure out how to turn it off. I have power tools installed but haven't seen this as an option before. I just mention it because I know it has options for coloring/sorting tabs.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
The behavior you're seeing is a result of the new "Sort by Most Recently Used" option added to Productivity Power Tools in July 2016.
This feature is enabled by default, but can be disabled in Tools > Options > Productivity Power Tools > Custom Document Well > Sorting: Most recently used.
My question is there code completion for Visual studio like in Netbeans where you cycle the buffer with ctrl+k, when you type something?
There's now a nice extension called Simple Autocomplete which adds one command simpleAutocomplete.next that you can map to a shortcut of your choice.
No, there isn't a similar feature in Visual Studio.
The traditional Visual Studio autocomplete is using intellisense.
When you start typing, intellisense may bring up a drop down with suggestions. In that case you can tab to complete using the current suggestion or use the arrow keys to choose another.
Ctrl-Space (or Alt-Right arrow) will bring up this intellisense menu if it's not up.
I find it does a pretty good job overall.
Some extensions like Resharper or Visual Assist offer their own code completion or other similar features (like Suggestion List for Visual Assist).
I know it's been ages since I asked this question but I found the next best thing to do this. What I would suggest is to use VsVim extension and to use Vim's anyword completion; however, in order for this work, what must be resolved is the keyboard shortcuts that conflict:
Go to "Tools options" in Visual Studio.
Then go to VsVim category(alternatively you can search "VsVim" and
should bring the options) and click keyboard.
As far as I know vim deals with this type of completion with these keys
CTRL+P and CTRL+N so what we do is to let Visual Studio give up
these keybindings and let VsVim deal with it by Selecting from the drop
down of the keys(CTRL+P and CTRL+N) and let it be "Handled by VsVim".
I hope this has helped someone out.
Is there any way to "pin" a document into a fixed position? I want to keep the "Source Control Explorer" tab on the far left and always open new documents to the right of it.
However, VS 2010 tends to add documents at the very left. I want "Source Control Explorer" on the very far left so I always know where to find it.
I can think of two different ways of doing this. The first one uses only options that are built into Visual Studio 2010 but is more limited and may not work 100% of the time. The other one requires that you install an extension, but is much more powerful, dependable, and even adds some other useful features.
You can configure Visual Studio to always open new tabs to the right of existing tabs, just like a web browser would. (Personally, I prefer this option.) To do this, open the options dialog (Tools → Options), expand the "Environment" category, click on "Documents" and check the "Insert documents to the right of existing tabs" box (see screen shot).
The key to making this work for you is to ensure that you always open the Source Control Explorer first before opening any other code windows, and then never close it. That way, it will always be on the far left, and all of the code windows you open will be inserted to the right of it.
Like I mentioned above, the advantage of this approach is that it uses a setting built into Visual Studio and doesn't require that you install anything extra. All you have to do is flip a switch. The disadvantage is that it isn't 100% dependable—if you close the Source Control Explorer and re-open it, you'll have to remember to drag it back into position at the far left or it won't be there when you go to look for it.
You can install Microsoft's Productivity Power Tools extension (available from the Visual Studio gallery), which adds the ability to pin tabs (among lots of other neat features) to the VS IDE. There's a great run-down of the features added specifically to the document tab well here, but the feature you're most interested in is pinned tabs. You can even show pinned tabs in a separate row!
This is as close to a perfect solution as it gets, but it does have the disadvantage of requiring you to install something extra. In some environments and for some people, that can be a deal killer. Too many extensions can also slow things down, and later versions of Visual Studio often seem to be slow enough already. (Though, for what it's worth, I use the PPT extension on about half of my VS installations and I haven't noticed that it has caused any significant issues.)
Resharper has some commands I just can't live without (keybindings are given for the Visual Studio template):
Open by filename (Ctrl+Shift+T)
Locate in solution explorer (alt-shift-T, useful only when solution explorer is configured not to track the current file already)
Does visual studio have alternatives to these that don't require Resharper? I know VS2010 adds the "Edit.NavigateTo" command (Ctrl+,) but it is slow and shows every useless symbol that might be what you want (too noisy).
Is anything similar offered by other perhaps free addons?
You might want to try the Solution Navigator feature that is bundled with the free Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools extension. It appears to have more powerful support for searching for files and symbols all combined within the Solution Explorer.
Visual Studio can be quite slow to open and work with. The menus and auto-hide windows can get sluggish and commands take a while to start. What are the list of things one can do to make the UI of Visual Studio load faster and operate faster? What settings can one change to make it feel lean and minimal?
PS: I know Visual Studio Express is way leaner and faster. However, I rely on some Visual Studio addons, and addons are not supported in Express.
PS2: I have already closed all unnecessary windows. All diagnostic windows are on auto-hide. And all the tool bars are closed. I work almost completely using keyboard shortcuts.
Here are some tips, actually collected from following blog posts
###VS2008
Improve Visual Studio's Source View Performance
Tips to improve performance of visual studio IDE
Visual Studio 2008 Tweaks
###VS2010
Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 1: Startup
Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 2: Text Editor
Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 3: A Technical Update
###Tips
Turn off background HTML validation.
Go to Tools / Options and select Text
Editor / HTML / Validation in the
tree view on the left side. Uncheck the Show Errors
check box.
Turn off AutoRecover. Go to Tools /
Options and select Environment /
AutoRecover in the tree view.
Uncheck the Save AutoRecover check box.
Close your property grid (View /
Properties Window)
web.config should not have <compilation batch=”false” />
Turn off AutoToolboxPopulate (Tools
-> Options -> Windows Forms Designer set AutoToolboxPopulate False)
Turn off Track Active item (Tools ->
Options -> Projects and Solutions
uncheck Track Active Item in Solution
Explorer)
Disable Navigation Bar(Tools ->
Options -> Text Editor -> C#, uncheck
Navigation bar)
Move file in App_Code into a class
library project
Disable validation Options for HTML
Editing (Tools -> Options ->
Validation -> Clear show error
checkbox)
I know that VS 2008 slowed down from VS 2005. I feel this pain every once in a while when im doing a quick Find or Find-Replace, or Find-In-Solution...etc. The UI sometimes isn't as fast as your hands are (when you're using keyboard shortcuts).
I found that just slowing down sometimes is the way to do it (it sucks, but then again, so does many things about Windows).
If it's load times youre concerned about; disable the startup stuff (from the Options menu). Here you can choose to load a blank screen upon VS load AND not to subscribe to any news feeds. (this helps alot depending on your internet connection).
you can also, via Options, adjust the visual animations that occur, as well as just disabling them altogether.
If there's anything else im missing, which im sure there is, i'd really like to know as well!
One thing that can potentially speed up visual studio is to disable document navigation.
Go to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> and uncheck 'Navigation Bar'.
This is definitately an option in 2008, pretty sure its in 2005 too.
Another option to try:
Go to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor and Uncheck 'Track Changes'.
Without knowing the information I posted in the comments I will say the typical stuff. Turn off all addons, if you are using vista or 7 switch to basic vs aero, check all running processes. This is where I would start.