Is there any way to force Visual Studio to copy selected code to the clipboard as unformatted text?
When I am copy-pasting code into Word or more often Outlook I have to do it via Notepad to get rid of the formatting...there has to be an easier way!
This feature can be turned off by editor.copyWithSyntaxHighlighting.
Visual Studio does put unformatted text on the clipboard, but it also puts formatted text. (The clipboard supports multiple simultaneous formats, and the OS assumes that they're simply different representations of the same data, although there's no technical enforcement of that point.)
The application you're using to paste then chooses its preferred format. In Word, and maybe Outlook as well, there is a "Paste Special" command that allows you to choose which format you want to use.
My department uses PureText. Sits in the system tray; copy text, click-it - strips all formatting leaving the plain-vanilla text. I'm sure it's much like PlainTextClipboard.
"PureText is basically equivalent to
opening Notepad, doing a PASTE,
followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a
COPY. The benefit of PureText is
performing all these actions with a
single Hot-Key and having the result
pasted into the current window
automatically."
The goad for this was flaky Lotus Notes; likes to crash when pasting HTML-marked-up-text that I innocently copied from a web-page....
If you press CTRL+Z after pasting, it will reverse to the non-formatting one, because the formatting actually counts as one step after the regular paste.
When I do it choosing the little pop-up menu option attached to the wee clipboard item "Match Destination Formatting" does the trick for me.
From this blog post I got these instructions for getting rid of the black background when copying & pasting out of VS with the 'Dark Theme' activated, but the html in it can be tweaked to alter the rest of the formatting as required (e.g. set all text to black).
If required, install Productivity Power Tools
Open Tools → Extensions and Updates
Select Online (Visual Studio Gallery) and search for Productivity Power Tools 2012/2013
Download and restart Visual Studio when prompted
Productivity Power Tools Settings
Open Tools → Options → Expand Productivity Power Tools
select HTML Copy
Change the BeforeCodeSnippet option to:
<style type="text/css">.identifier {color:black !important;}</style>
<pre style="{font-family}{font-size}{font-weight}{font-style}">
Change EmitSpanClass to: True
Check EmitSpanStyle is: True
You might find http://www.extrabit.com/plaintextclipboard/ to be a useful tool. Some applications have a paste option which strips formatting, but what you really need is a copy operation that strips formatting, which VS does not offer.
In Outlook 2007, I've changed my default paste to do text only.
Go to Editor Options | Advanced
Under the "Cut, copy, paste" heading choose Pasting from other programs: [Keep Text Only]
And if you still want to paste formatted (less often in my case), use paste special...
Search editor.copyWithSyntaxHighlighting in Settings and disable it. Whoever enabled it by default must be flogged.
This Microsoft Office site offers a workaround that involves writing a macro to replace ctrl+v functionality to paste plain text all the time, but that may not be what you want. You can alternatively remap an unused shortcut (ctrl+?) to provide you with this functionality so you don't have to keep enabling / disabling the macro.
For applications that do not have a "paste special" you could use an application like PureText
The Visual Studio Extension Copy for review may be handy for you. Actually, it does not do unformatted copying, but applies it's own simple text-based template.
It supports a "Stack Overflow" format, which just removes the leading whitespace, while keeping the indentation as much as possible, and introduces some sort of header.
Get it from the from the Visual Studio Gallery and try it out.
Disclosure: I am the author of that Extension. Please notfiy me, if I can improve it to your needs.
A trick when applies:
You don't want to install an extension
Your destination application doesn't have options such as "Paste Special"..
You can copy the code and paste it in VS Code search box (shows when you press Ctrl+F). Then copy it again from there.
Then you can paste unformatted text anywhere you want.
Related
Is there a built-in feature or available add-on for Visual Studio 2010 that will clean up spacing in C++ code so that annoying blocks like this:
RandomVar=RandomList.RandomMethod();
will become
RandomVar = RandomList.RandomMethod();
(Same goes for spacing in loops, etc.)
...or do I need to do this myself with find/replace and regex?
I think You are looking for Edit->Advanced->Format document. This will re-format your current document according to settings in Tools->Options->Text Editor->c/c++->Formatting.
It's keyboard shortcut Ctrl+E+D in my case.
Although originally for C code formatting lint has been modified to cover C++ and ported to many platforms.
Some lint variants only report inconsistent layout, others can fix it for you. some are free others paid for versions.
This would be an outside the IDE fix as this is a sperate tool (at least traditionally it is!)
This wikipeadia article lists a few possible sources for lint tools
(this was a footer in my orginal question, but as that posed two solutions I extracted it here so you can accept a specifc answer should you find one apropriate)
This is not a proper "Solution" but a possible work-around without the need for finding external tools
In the "Tools" menu pick "Options..."
In this dialog navigate to
"Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Formatting"
Set the layout options as you
would like your code to look.
Click OK.
Now in a unit with "bad"
formatting from the menu select "Edit->Advanced->Format document" and the IDE wil reformat the
document to match your settings.
For C#, VB etc the "Formating" option has several sub nodes that provide a fine grain of control for the sort of spacing options you ask for. The list for C/C++ is flat and very limited by comparison. I suspect there is not enough flexability for the layout you want.
So you probably cannot get the formatting you want directly. How about...
Set the spacing rules you want for C++ in the C# settings
Temporarily adding a C# project to your solution
adding a class to that
emptying it.
paste the C++ in (causing a reformat)
copy back to the original file
rinse and repeat
remove the temporary C# project
I have to say this is not pretty, but given the syntactical similarities between C++ and C# its probably a close match.
The auto-formatting settings for C++ in Eclipse are more extensive than in Visual Studio, so I ended up using that instead.
As I am copying something from within a method, and pasting it into a word document, the code I am copying is already indented. When I paste it I therefore end up with a load of white space next to each line.
I need to copy without this. In C# I can just unindent my code, hit copy, and then indent it back again using the buttons in the IDE. But Visual Basic automatically forces indentation so any attempts to change it don't work.
Visual Studio supports block selection. Press the alt key and drag the cursor to start block selection.
Visual Studio Select Block Text
This is a very useful feature, specially when pasting code here on SO. Visual Studio 2010 will even support multi-line editing using the box selection.
Unfortunately, it seems VB doesn't support the Edit.Advanced.Tabify/Untabify or Increase / Decrease Indent commands.
Here is what you can do:
Go to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor and uncheck "pretty listing (reformatting) of code"
Select the text block you wish to copy without indentation
Go to Edit -> Advanced and click "Delete Horizontal White Space" (or: Ctrl K, Ctrl )
Copy and paste your code in Word.
Turn the "pretty listing" option back on.
the "Delete Horizontal White Space" command will unindent the entire selected text so that there is no tab/whitespace to the left of any line (unlike Block Selection, as prorposed by João Angelo, which will unindent the selected block but keep any indentation within the block).
You may use the Visual Studio extension Copy for review. Besides some formatting, it removes unnecessary whitespace. It works for Visual Basic, among other languages.
Disclosure: I am the author of that extension. Please notify me, if I can improve it to your needs.
Is there a keyboard shortcut to quickly find and open a file in Visual Studio 2005/2008 like how they do it in TextMate?
In textmate Command + T in Textmate brings up something that you can type a few key which would display all relevant files and allow you to quickly select one, Command + T back and forth also allows you to quickly alternate between 2 files most recently used. This is extremely helpful.
I am aware that there is a Ctrl + Alt + ↓ which shows a list of all open documents which is almost there but not quite.
You can hit Ctrl+D to go to the search box, then type >of filename (with autocomplete).
You can also do this and other commands in the command window or the immediate window.
Or, if you don't mind buying, ReSharper has Go to File which I highly recommend. It's Ctrl+Shift+N and it brings up a nice search dialog that supports wildcards and other shortcuts.
Sonic File Finder is a free VS plugin which is basically the same thing, and quite well-loved by most people who install it.
http://www.jens-schaller.de/sonictools/sonicfilefinder/index.htm
I think the best solution is the following
CTRL + , (comma) then type your file/class/method name
I've made an extension that works exactly like Textmate's "go to file" feature: https://github.com/maxt3r/VS-CmdT
If you go to the search box in visual studio and type ">open " and then start typing, autocomplete will come up for all the files in your solution. This is in 2008, not so sure about 2005.
Out of the box in Visual Studio, Ctrl + Tab will toggle between the two most recent files.
Ctrl+Shift+T in Resharper works just like you describe. It provides a text box in which you type the filename and it generates a live list from which you can pick from. Nice features include wildcarding (e.g. Customer*xaml) and matching on camel case filenames (e.g. SVD will match SingleValueDecomposition.cs). At my work, if people use one feature of Resharper, it will be Ctrl+Shift+T.
If you code in C++ rather than C#, then Visual Assist provides some functionality. And in my opinion, works better than Resharper.
Sara Ford has a blog post about this: Did you know... How to open a file in the solution without using either a tool window or a dialog?
All the previous responses are accurate and are mentioned in her post and the comments. In addition, another approach is to launch the command window using CTRL+ALT+A then typing in "of filename" or "open filename" in the same way mentioned for the search field.
#Adam Neal mentioned ReSharper. Another popular tool is CodeRush/Refactor! Pro and it also has a file navigation window that can be launched (and searched) via the CTRL+ALT+F shortcut.
I have to turn in a hard copy of some code with an assignment. Is there any way in Visual Studio 2010 to print C# source code with syntax highlighting?
PS: The assignment is solving a math problem, so the choice of language isn't important and the teacher doesn't need to compile and run the program. She just wants to see our approach and results.
There is an extension now :) Visual Studio 2010 Color Printing Extension
Works well! :)
The best way I've found to accomplish this is to copy from Visual Studio and paste into something like MS Word or OpenOffice Writer.
This gives you full source code, with syntax highlighting. You can then print from Word (including adding your intro documentation before the code, etc).
Just to let everyone know, unfortunately printing in color was cut from Visual Studio 2010 because of resource constraints. Since we've rewritten the editor from scratch in WPF, we didn't have time to reimplement everything so we had to sacrifice this feature. We will try to implement this in the next version of Visual Studio. For now, copy to clipboard and paste into other app such as Microsoft Word is the recommended solution for printing code with color.
If you go to Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Fonts and Colors you can change settings to print with syntax highlighting (change 'Show settings for' dropdown to 'Printer'). But you will need to change all the individual settings to match your IDE (I don't know of a way to make it automatic)
Edit: you can use that "Use..." button next to the dropdown to copy settings from the Text Editor
Simplest of all copy code to clipboard and paste into MS-Word is the way I do and it works...
Have a look at VS.NETcodePrint 2010 availabe from www.starprinttools.com. You will be able to print and export the color coded output to PDF.
Joginder Nahil
Due the fact MSVS does not support it anymore I think the best way is really to copy the code and paste it into WinWord.
The advantages are listed below. You can
set the font/size exactly how you want it.
set the format of line numbers.
have your own header/footer.
remove #region from printing.
add a watermark to the output.
For me - I print once in 2 months a source code - it is a very comfortable way which I never could achieve with any 3rd party extension.
Is there anyway to disable the rather annoying feature that Visual Studio (2008 in my case) has of copying the line (with text on it) the cursor is on when CTRL-C is pressed and no selection is made?
I know of the option to disable copying blank lines. But this is driving me crazy as well.
ETA: I'm not looking to customize the keyboard shortcut.
ETA-II: I am NOT looking for "Tools->Options->Text Editor->All Languages->Apply cut or copy to blank lines...".
The real problem you probably experience is that you go to paste, with CTRL+V. And you accidentally type CTRL+C, and end up overwriting the stuff that's on your clipboard. You can't disable this as far as I know, however, the work around for this, is that you can press CTRL+SHIFT+V multiple times to go back up the stack of things you have copied in visual studio. Not only does this allow you to recover what you originally copied, but you'll also find that CTRL+SHIFT+V very useful in a lot of other situations.
If you aren't willing to customize the keyboard settings, then Ctrl+C will always be Edit.Copy, which will copy the current line if nothing is selected. If you aren't willing to use the tools VS provides to customize the interface, then you can't do it.
However, the following works:
Assign this macro to Ctrl+C:
Sub CopyOnlyIfSelection()
Dim s As String = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text
Dim n As Integer = Len(s)
If n > 0 Then
DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Copy()
End If
End Sub
There's an extension called CopyOnlySelection for visual studio 2019 and 2017:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=KiwiProductions.CopyOnlySelection
This won't solve it immediately, but will add another command called Edit.CopyOnlySelection, which you can bind to Ctrl+C (and remove Ctrl+C from the normal Edit.Copy).
I'm pretty sure the way to do it in 2008 is the same as the way in 2005... check out this tutorial on 'customizing keyboard shortcuts' (about 1/3 of the way down)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb245788(VS.80).aspx
I don't believe it is possible to do this without some type of 3rd party clip board manager that would prevent you from overwriting the clipboard content with the empty string.
I've the free SlickEdit add-in installed, and its CommandSpy feature shows that Ctrl+C executes Edit.Copy whether you've got text highlighted or not. Therefore I guess the answer to your question is No.
However, I do remember this feature annoying the hell out of me when I first encountered it; now I rely on it and get annoyed when I try the same trick in other programs and nothing happens.
I have the same problem, but I found a workaround of it.
When I click one time on word in text editor, all occurrences of it are highlighted.
Then I think I will copy this word. But double-click will select text to copy only.
I copy then whole line instead wanted text.
Problem Is: Color of highlighted text parts are very similar to selected text.
I changed these colors to make it easy to distinguish between the situations.
Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Font and colors -> Selected Text
Tools -> Options -> Environment ->Font and colors -> Highlighted references
This is fixed in the latest preview of VS2022 (17.4.0 Preview 3.0)
It now has the option: 'Cut or Copy the current line without selection' and I can confirm that it works.
As for the original question, I don't think it will be fixed in VS2008 :-)