Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 4, Customizing Visual Studio

#24 Create Your Own Shortcuts

HACK

Once you click the Assign button, your new shortcut will be added to your

keyboard mapping and you can start using it right away. Creating shortcut

keys is something that you should do over time as you notice yourself

accessing something over and over again through the menu structure. Every-

thing is faster with the keyboard, especially when writing code. Developing

your own set of keyboard shortcuts over time is a great way to improve the

speed of your development.

Hacking the Hack

So now that you have spent time to create your own set of shortcut keys, tai-

lored to your own style of development, what happens when you switch

machines? While there is a way to save and move keyboard settings manu-

ally, it is much easier and less troublesome to use the excellent power toy

VSTweak to move the settings for you. VSTweak provides an interface to

export and then import keyboard mapping schemes quickly and easily.

The VSTweak power toy is one of the more useful power toys for Visual Stu-

dio and is the subject of a number of different hacks in this book. The

VSTweak power toy can be downloaded from http://workspaces.gotdotnet.

com/vstweak.

Figure 4-2. Adding a new shortcut key for Build.RebuildSolution

Create Your Own Shortcuts #