Visual Studio Hacks

Add Guidelines to the Text Editor #10

Chapter 2, Master the Editor

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HACK

From the Regions Dialog, you can select the region you want to add the

selected code to or you can decide to add it to a new region and click the

Add New Region checkbox. This is particularly useful if you are adding a

new property to the class; instead of opening the existing region and

appending it to the end, you can write the property anywhere you want and

then select it and move it to that region.

The Regions Add-in is a valuable tool that makes working with regions even

easier than it already is.

HACK

#10

Add Guidelines to the Text Editor Hack #10

If you’ve got to have everything line up just right, turn on guidelines and get

everything pixel perfect.

One of the features missing from the text editor in Visual Studio is the abil-

ity to add vertical guidelines. Vertical guidelines are thin vertical lines that

can be used as visual guides when aligning text. This feature is not actually

missing though—using a simple registry hack, you can add up to 13 differ-

ent guidelines to Visual Studio’s text editor.

When editing the registry, you should always back up your

registry or use the alternative registry method

[Hack #30].

To add guidelines:

1. Close Visual Studio.

2. Open regedit (Start

➝ Run ➝ type regedit).

Figure 2-20. Regions Dialog

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Chapter 2, Master the Editor

#10 Add Guidelines to the Text Editor

HACK

3. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\

<7.1>\Text Editor.

4. Right-click on the Text Editor key and choose New

➝ String Value and

name it “Guides”.

5. Set the value of the guides to

RGB(128, 128, 128) 4, 16.

The first part of the value sets the color of the guidelines using common red,

green, and blue values. 128, 128, and 128 sets the color of the guidelines to

gray. The second numbers specify where the guidelines should appear. In

this example, guidelines will be shown at the 4-space mark as well as the 16-

space mark. You can add up to 13 different guidelines by simply adding

more numeric values separated by commas.

After you have created your registry entry, you will see guidelines in the

marks specified when you launch Visual Studio. Figure 2-21 shows an exam-

ple of the results from the example settings.

Removing these guidelines is simply a matter of deleting the Guides registry

key and restarting Visual Studio.

Guidelines are easy to add and can be very useful when trying to keep your

code organized. Thanks to Sara Ford for posting about this hidden feature

on her blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford.

Figure 2-21. Guidelines in Visual Studio