The fastest way to add files and folders
Grace Taylor
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.
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10 comments
Great feature! Big time saver! 🙂 Would be great to add ability to add several sibling folders like “Folder1|Folder2|Folder3”.
There is, just comma-separate them like this: “folder1/, folder2/, folder3/”
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 immediately start typing out the properties of the class because it’ll create the file, jump focus to the code editor and the caret would already be between the curly braces of my new class.
Today, when a new file is created (without Mads’ extension), the focus remains on the solution explorer, so when I tap the up arrow, I’m suddenly looking at an entirely different file since I just changed the file selection. This is the sole reason I’m still using the extension instead of this new built-in feature.
Thanks!
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 new name to replace the placeholder like most edit controls (so, highlight the filename and extension too, since I often add a mix of .h and .cpp files, and VS can’t anticipate which I will want) or just leave it blank to begin with, thus leaving Escape to its normal duty.
If the filename actually contains a comma, do we just put it in quotes? (e.g. “Foo, bar”, “another file name”) Cheers
If you don’t want the default file extension and that way also have ESC close the dialog, vote for this item: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Remove-default-file-extension-for-Quick/10203798?ftype=idea&q=quick+add+default+file+
Great tips
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)”?
See Mads reply to Eugene. Looks like he already thought of that!!!!!!!!
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.
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.