Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 2, Master the Editor

#6 Master the Clipboard

HACK

HACK

#6

Master the Clipboard Hack #6

In theory, a clipboard should be simple: copy, cut, or paste. But that’s no fun!

You can learn how to really supercharge these operations.

Visual Studio contains a number of different features pertaining to cutting

and pasting and the clipboard. Some of these features are old text editor

favorites that are finally making it into Visual Studio, and some are new inno-

vations from the Visual Studio team. These might seem like small features in

a program that is as feature-packed as Visual Studio, but the clipboard will

affect your day-to-day programming more than most other features.

Clipboard Ring

When you copy and paste text in any application, you are usually limited to

copying and pasting one item at a time. If you want to copy two separate

sentences, you have to copy the first one, paste it, then come back and

repeat this for the next sentence. This can become tedious when you have 10

different things to copy and they reside in 10 different places in the docu-

ment. You end up switching back and forth between the two documents 10

times, once for each sentence you want to copy.

The clipboard ring eliminates this limitation. The clipboard ring allows you

to cut or copy up to 20 selections and access them using a keyboard short-

cut. Here is the process for using the clipboard ring:

1. Copy (Ctrl-C, Edit.Copy) ...