Visual Studio Tip: Close the Windows You Want

When you have too many Editor windows open, you can pick which Windows you don't need any more and close them all with a single click.

Eventually, I have so many tabs open across the top of my Visual Studio editor window that I recognize I have to close most -- but not all -- of my Windows. Unfortunately, when I right-click on the tabs I get two choices that don't do what I want: I can close all the windows, or close every window but the one I clicked on. I often pick that last choice (Close All But This) even though I really want to keep a few more Windows open.

You can pick and choose among your open editor Windows by going to Visual Studio's Window menu and selecting the Windows menu choice (it's right at the bottom of the menu). This brings up a dialog box that lists all the open Windows. If you hold down the Control key, you can select which Windows you want to close and then close them all by clicking the dialog box's Close Windows button.

This isn't a perfect solution -- I usually want to close more windows than I want to leave open, so I wish I could select the Windows to leave open rather than select the Windows I want to close. The windows are also listed in the dialog box in alphabetical order -- I'd prefer they list reflect the tab order (I often group together tabs for windows that I use together). But it's closer to what I want than Close All But This.

About the Author

Peter Vogel is a system architect and principal in PH&V Information Services. PH&V provides full-stack consulting from UX design through object modeling to database design. Peter tweets about his VSM columns with the hashtag #vogelarticles. His blog posts on user experience design can be found at http://blog.learningtree.com/tag/ui/.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Cloud-Focused .NET Aspire 9.1 Released

    Along with .NET 10 Preview 1, Microsoft released.NET Aspire 9.1, the latest update to its opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.

  • Microsoft Ships First .NET 10 Preview

    Microsoft shipped .NET 10 Preview 1, introducing a raft of improvements and fixes across performance, libraries, and the developer experience.

  • C# Dev Kit Previews .NET Aspire Orchestration

    Microsoft's dev team has been busy updating the C# Dev Kit, a Visual Studio Code extension that enhances the C# development experience by providing tools for managing, debugging, and editing C# projects.

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events