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Visual Studio 2022 Getting VS Code 'Command Palette' Equivalent

As any Visual Studio Code user knows, the editor's command palette is a powerful tool for getting things done quickly, without having to navigate through menus and dialogs. Now, we learn how an equivalent is coming for Microsoft's flagship Visual Studio IDE, invoked by the same familiar Ctrl+Shift+P keyboard shortcut.

That "Feature Search" command, along with another keyboard shortcut, was recently teased by Microsoft's Mads Kristensen, known for soliciting feedback on development tooling features/functionality and providing same via extensions for Visual Studio, which are often baked in to the IDE.

New Keyboard Shortcuts
[Click on image for larger view.] New Keyboard Shortcuts (source: X).

The other shortcut, Ctrl+/, will invoke "Toggle Line Comment." In response to a comment/question, Kristensen, a principal program manager working on Visual Studio, said the new keyboard shortcuts are coming to Visual Studio 2022 versions 17.10 and 17.11. He also revealed these are new shortcuts, with nothing being removed.

On March 19 Kristensen asked "What is the one feature you wish Visual Studio had?" in a post that garnered 297 responses and more than 63,000 views.

In his post this week, developers also suggested more, including:

  • How about ctrl + tab switching tabs instead of opening the "tab preview" pane which doesn't sort tabs the same way as they are opened in the editor?
  • Ctrl + T to run all tests in test explorer
    Alt T debug tests
  • Please add a shortcut on the "Check for nulls" checkbox when refactoring to add a new constructor.

Stay tuned to see how those suggestions pan out.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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