Use Ctrl+Alt+DownArrow to quickly access all your open files
Today’s tip comes from “some cool dev” who wrote the new Window Management features for Visual Studio 2005. At the end of the File Tab Channel, there’s a drop-down arrow and a close ‘x’ button. If you press the drop-down arrow, you’ll get a menu of all the open files in Visual Studio in alphabetical order. Simply click on a file name, and it’ll open on the left-side of the IDE file channel.
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Now for today’s actual tip. The command to drop down the menu is bound to “Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow”. Anywhere in the IDE, you can press Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow and get the menu to pop-up. Now, you can type the name of the file (or the first few unique characters of the file name) to quickly select that file.
Not jazzed about using two hands to access this keyboard shortcut? Change it by going to Tools – Options – Keyboard, and type in the Show commands containing edit box “Window.ShowEzMDIFileList” and bind it to whatever. Just make sure you’re in Global scope (you can use any scope, but Global scope makes the most sense for this feature.)
Looking for more Window Management / File Tab Channel tips: check out these…
- Introduction to the New Visual Studio 2005 Window Management Features (w/ screenshots)
- How to save your favorite window layouts in Visual Studio .NET 2003
- How to enable or disable the IDE Navigator
- How to optimize Visual Studio for Multi-Monitor setups
- How to optimize your Tool Window Debugging Layout