BOX selection and Last Position

[Nerseus]

I don't know if many people know about this, so I thought I'd throw it out there. If you hold down Alt while dragging the mouse over a text selection in VS.NET (or hold Alt while using Shift-Arrows), it will do a BOX selection. In VS 1.0 you had to double click on the status bar where it said "STREAM" to switch it to "BOX". This doesn't exist in VB6 or prior.

 

So what is BOX selection? It means the usual highlighting of text is a rectangle rather than selecting from a start to and end point which includes all text on every line in between. It's probably easier to try it yourself than for me to explain it :)

 

One other "cool" feature of VS.NET: Last/Next Position. If you press Ctrl-"-" (Ctrl plus the minus key), it will jump to the last place you had the cursor. VERY useful for returning to code you looked at previously, especially after a "Goto Definition" jump.

 

As a side note, I use a MS Explorer mouse. With Intellipoint 4.0 software (free from MS), you can define keystrokes to mouse buttons, per EXE. I have defined the mouse-wheel button (not scrolling, but the click) to Ctrl-"-". I pretty much never use the middle mouse button since the mouse wheel does the up/down scrolling. By reassigning this, I can easily jump backwards in code to see where I've been. I also assigned Ctrl-Shift-"-" to the right-side button (I have a 5 button mouse with the Forward/Back buttons on the side), so that I can move forward through code as well, to get back to where I was. It's been extremely useful when looking at a couple of pieces of code - I find using the code splitter bar to be more trouble than it's worth for the most part (though useful in some scenarios).

 

Just thought I'd share this with everyone.

 

-Nerseus

[Robby]

Nice tips Nerseus... (I do the same with the push of my scroll wheel, but I only have 2 buttons)

[divil]

Very useful tips Nerseus, I had no idea VS could do column selection :)

[Nerseus]

More importantly, it does BOX pasting :)

 

-Nerseus