Practical .NET

Move from Tab to Tab in the Visual Studio Toolbox Without the Mouse

You don't need to take your hands off the keyboard to move to another tab in the Toolbox.

The tool window I spend the most time scrolling up and down in is Solution Explorer. A close second for screwing around in is the Toolbox. If you're tired of reaching for the mouse, you can scroll through the Toolbox just by holding down the Control key and pressing the Up (or Down) arrow.

The one problem is that you don't scroll between the tabs in the Toolbox -- you scroll to the first or last item in each tab. This means that, as you arrow up or down, you'll expand every tab in the Toolbox. That's pretty ugly, but you can collapse all of the tabs by pressing the forward slash (/) key (I discussed that in an earlier tip that also showed how to search for specific items in the Toolbox).

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/.

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