February 27th, 2023

The fastest way to add files and folders

Grace Taylor
Product Manager

Your Visual Studio team is excited to announce the release of the highly anticipated “Quick Add Files & Folders” feature in Visual Studio version 17.5!

This new feature is the fastest and most convenient way to add files and create folders within your projects. Based on the feedback from the Visual Studio Developer Community, Quick Add was requested and highly voted on, making it a top priority for our development team. Yes, your votes matter!

The team has iterated on the early preview to bring you the most efficient and effective way to manage your files.

Check out this video to learn more and then try it out and see how much time you can save.

The two shortcuts to remember are:

Ctrl+Shift+A Opens the last-used Add New Item dialog
Shift+F2 Always opens the compact Add New Item dialog

Have you tried this feature yet? Let us know what you think about it in the comments below.

Author

Grace Taylor
Product Manager

I build personalized developer tools that make Visual Studio more flexible and comfortable for individuals and teams. These personalizations include color themes between VS/VS Code, color tabs, and personalization in Dev Boxes, in the Shell and platform.

10 comments

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  • Steve BenzMicrosoft employee

    I struggled to find it – the text in the Welcome-to-17.5 page didn’t say how to invoke it. I expected Ctrl+N or File->New… to bring up the experience. I certainly wish it did, as I really like how the feature is executed, otherwise.

    • Christoph Engels

      The shortcuts are mentioned in the blog post and the video therein. It’s Ctrl+Shift+A, so the new dialog is part of the “Add file” process, not the “New file” one.

  • Stuart Ballard

    This looks amazing!

    What if you want to add multiple files in the same folder? Do you have to type “Folder/File1.cs, Folder/File2.cs” or is there a shorthand for that scenario like “Folder/(File1.cs, File2.cs)”?

    • Peasley, Alex · Edited

      See Mads reply to Eugene. Looks like he already thought of that!!!!!!!!

  • Melanie Le · Edited

    Great tips

  • Dwayne Robinson · Edited

    Looks useful, as the old "New item" dialog was a slug. Sadly I had to roll back to 17.4.5 today because of some internal compiler errors, but I'll gladly try this feature once that unrelated issue is fixed.

    Having the Escape key clear the text is pretty weird (0:48 in the YouTube video), rather than standard behavior of closing the dialog. 🤔 I'd rather just press backspace to clear the whole text or just type the...

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  • Whit Waldo · Edited

    If I could have one change made to the Add New File tool in VS, it would be that it more closely mimic what Mads' tool does: When a file(s) is created, automatically jump focus from the Solution Explorer to the first line that makes sense in the context of the newly created file (e.g. between the open brackets of a new class). Ideally, this would mean that I can create the new file and...

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  • Eugene Ivanoff · Edited

    Great feature! Big time saver! 🙂 Would be great to add ability to add several sibling folders like “Folder1|Folder2|Folder3”.

    • Mads KristensenMicrosoft employee

      There is, just comma-separate them like this: “folder1/, folder2/, folder3/”