Announcing Update to Productivity Power Tools 2013

Visual Studio Blog

Today, we’re releasing an update to Productivity Power Tools 2013 on the Visual Studio Gallery. In this release, we fixed a number of customer-reported bugs and issues, and introduced a new feature called syntactic line compression.

Syntactic line compression enables you to make better use of your screen’s vertical real-estate. It shrinks lines that contain neither letters nor numbers by 25% vertically, allowing more lines to be displayed in the editor. Other lines are not affected.

Here’s an illustration of the same code before and after the feature is applied. You can see the extra lines you can get in the same space with no loss of content:

Before And After Syntactic Line Compression NCL

As with all Productivity Power Tools features, if you don’t like it you can turn it on and off in Tools…Options…Editor…Productivity Power Tools – but do let us know if there are things that you’d like to see that would make it more useful to you:

Tools Options With Syntactic Line Compression Main Switch

For Syntactic Line Compression we’re also providing the ability to tune the way it works with a couple of extra settings:Tools Options With Syntactic Line Compression SubSwitches

As you can see, these settings give you some control over the kind of lines which will be compressed.

You can pick up the new release right now on the Visual Studio Gallery. We hope you enjoy this new release, and look forward to hearing your feedback, both here on the blog and on the Visual Studio Gallery.

image Author: Mark Wilson-Thomas, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio

Mark Wilson-Thomas is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio team, currently working on the Visual Studio Editor. He has worked on developer tools for the last 8 years, including tools for Office, SQL and XAML. Prior to moving to the US he was a consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services in the UK on large scale projects. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked for BP Oil plc as a Process Modelling Chemist, and for QA plc building web-based Learning Management Systems.

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