Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer – Extension #7

Recursively Collapse Nodes in the Solution Explorer!

The Visual Studio IDE team has heard a lot of feedback asking for a way to recursively collapse nodes in the solution explorer. For example, right out of the box, when you collapse a node in Solution Explorer, it only collapse just that node. But, what if you want to collapse all sub-nodes at the same time? Then you’ll want to install the Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer extension.

To Install

The extension can be found on the Visual Studio Gallery at https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cb0ec47d-05a4-40a7-ba39-9a2da6492f1c

To Use

Once installed, you’ll see a new button in the Solution Explorer toolbar. This button will recursively collapse the selected node or nodes (note: you can multi-select different nodes to recursively collapse at the same time.)

node with lots of sub nodes expanded

Now when we collapse and expand the TestApp project, we’ll see the sub-nodes also collapsed.

node with sub nodes collapsed

And the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+Num(-)

More Info

You can read more about this extension on the VS IDE team’s blog. https://blogs.msdn.com/visualstudio/archive/2010/05/13/announcing-collapse-selection-in-solution-explorer-extension.aspx