Thursday 18 January 2007

Mouse or Keyboard

As software developers, we all get the point on keeping skills up to date. Whether that is learning a new language, or learning about design methodologies, it's an accepted norm in the software industry that we have to keep learning new things till we die (or retire).

My current area of study (in addition to the ongoing study of .Net 2.0) is all about getting to know the Visual Studio 2005 IDE better.

I started by visiting the MSDN Shortcut Key list which was useful for learning the existence of some of the obscure (to me at least) commands like Edit.SelectToLastGoBack. (selects from where the insertion point currently is to where it last was)

However after I got myself a copy of ReSharper in the Christmas sales and installed it, I found myself having to relearn the keyboard shortcuts again since ReSharper adds a whole slew of new commands as well as re-jigging the defaults. Now relearning shortcuts from two sets of documentation didn't really appeal, but rather than ending up resigning myself to lots of "right click, navigate oversized dropdown", I was lucky enough to stumble across SlickEdit Gadgets for VS2005.

More specifically the gadget Command Spy, this wonderful little utility records what command you use and can display what the shortcut keys are for that command. Which is really great when you've no idea what command rely lurks behind an option on some drop down list.

1 comment:

Charles Anderson said...

Graeme

Like you, I've just discovered the Edit.SelectToLastGoBack command. At first I thought it was going to be really useful, but I haven't been able to work out when VS2005 decides to set the GoBack position. Jumping via a Find does it, for instance, but not clicking to a new point in the text with the mouse.
As you found this two years ago, I wondered if you'd found some consistent rules for it.

Thanks,

Charles