October 31st, 2013

Updates to Editor Enhancements in Visual Studio 2013

In Visual Studio 2013 we have added many new features to the editor. To get a low down on how these features can help enhance productivity checkout our previous post on Visual Studio 2013 New Editor Features as well as What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 – IDE on MSDN.

Today, we want to share updates to these features that you will see in the final product.

Peek Definition (Alt + F12) is now Editable!

In Visual Studio 2013 Preview, we introduced an amazing new feature called “Peek Definition (Alt + F12)” that allowed you to browse definitions of symbols inline in the Editor keeping your context and place in code. We also promised you that we will soon be adding the ability to edit code in-place as well inside the Peek view. With Visual Studio 2013, we are glad to announce that Peek Definition is now fully editable!

The Peek feature is inspired by the Preview Tab feature that we introduced in VS 2012 and with the ability to edit, we wanted to keep the experience consistent. We know that editing is an important operation and thus when you edit a file opened in Peek, we automatically open the file in the Document Tab Well as a real tab. When you dismiss the Peek view, we keep the document open in the tab well with all your changes as well as the undo stack. We did a number of user studies to refine this feature and provide the best, most seamless experience to you as you edit your files inside Peek. We are thrilled with the customer feedback we have received so far in our user studies, and we hope you will love it too!

Editable Peek

NavigateTo (Ctrl + ,) is now Resizable with more contextual details!

In Visual Studio 2013 RTM, you can quickly search and navigate to symbols and files, and see a real time preview while doing so. You can also resize the NavigateTo window both horizontally and vertically as needed to see the results of your search.

Finally, using the options drop down in NavigateTo, you can turn on the ‘Show Details’ option for an in-panel details view, helping cases where disambiguation is needed.

navigate to

Please don’t forget to leave your comments below. You can submit your feature requests on User Voice and report bugs on Connect.

image Ala Shiban (@AlaShiban) – Program Manager, Visual Studio Editor Ala is passionate about people and technology that empowers us. He’s been on a PC since the Commodore64 days. Having worked with C, C++, VB, C#, Java, JavaScript and MATLAB, he combines his cross-language and platform insights to continue improving the developer experience on Visual Studio.
author Murali Krishna Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha (@MuraliKamalesha) – Program Manager, Visual Studio Editor Murali Krishna is a Program Manager with Microsoft and works on the Visual Studio Editor. He has been with Microsoft for over 5 years and has worked on a variety of products built on server-side and client-side technologies. Currently he is building futuristic editing experiences for the best IDE on the planet, Visual Studio.

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Visual Studio has been around since 1997 when it first released many of its programming tools in a bundle. Back then it came in 2 editions - Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise. Since then the family has expanded to include many more products, tools, and services.

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