Skip Back to an Earlier Change in Visual Studio -- Visual Studio Magazine

.NET Tips and Tricksby Peter Vogel

Skip Back to an Earlier Change in Visual Studio

One of my favorite features in Visual Studio is Ctrl+- (hold down the Control key and press the minus key). Every time I press Ctrl+-, I skip back to the previous place I rested my cursor. I use this feature a lot when, after navigating through my code to investigate something, I want to get back to my start position so that I can make my actual change.

The only problem with Ctrl+- is that it keeps track of almost every place I stopped -- getting back to the point where I want to make my change can require a lot of key presses.

There is a faster way: The navigation buttons at the left-hand end of the Visual Studio toolbar. In more recent versions of Visual Studio, these are two blue circles with right and left arrows on your toolbar; in earlier versions these are square buttons (still on the toolbar) with a page icon, plus right and left arrows. If you click the little down arrow beside these icons you'll get a list of all the places you visited recently: Just click on the one you want to go back to.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 02/16/2016

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