{"id":1793,"date":"2010-08-03T07:17:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-03T07:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/2010\/08\/03\/quick-access-extension\/"},"modified":"2022-10-12T14:16:21","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T21:16:21","slug":"quick-access-extension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/quick-access-extension\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick Access Extension"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With <a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/new-version-of-the-productivity-power-tools-is-available\/\">last week\u2019s release<\/a> of the <a href=\"http:\/\/visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef\">Productivity Power Tools<\/a>, we announced a new extension \u2013 <strong>Quick Access <\/strong>\u2013<strong>\u00a0<\/strong>that allows you to search and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE.\u00a0 You can launch Quick Access by pressing <strong>Ctrl+3, <\/strong>or by selecting <strong>View-&gt;Quick Access<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Quick Access will allow you to search and execute:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Menu Commands (including Editor context menus)<\/li>\n<li>Project Templates<\/li>\n<li>Options Pages (the tree view)<\/li>\n<li>Tool Windows<\/li>\n<li>Currently open documents in the Tab Well<\/li>\n<li>Tasks \u2013 which I\u2019ll get to below<\/li>\n<li>It will search any of the above that were added by extensions<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Because I get these questions a lot, I\u2019ll mention that Quick Access will NOT search:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Code<\/em> \u2013 use the wonderful <a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/announcing-the-solution-navigator\/\">Solution Navigator extension<\/a>!<\/li>\n<li><em>Contents of Tool Windows:<\/em> Quick Access will bring up the Tool Window that you want but it can\u2019t search the contents of that tool window.\u00a0 Fortunately, some tool windows (e.g., Solution Navigator) implemented their own search.<\/li>\n<li><em>Option Page contents:<\/em>\u00a0 Options pages are essentially a blank container for UI.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have metadata to query or a great way to parse the elements on the page.\u00a0 We know that this is an important area to address but it will most likely require architectural changes to VS.<\/li>\n<li><em>Item Templates:<\/em>\u00a0 Item templates are much trickier to search than project templates due to the filtering rules that the Add New Item dialog uses.\u00a0 The dialog\u2019s filtering APIs aren\u2019t exposed so unless we did a lot of work to build our own filtering, it would be easy to add a C++ file to a C# project \u2013 not something that we want to do.<\/li>\n<li><em>Online sites <\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of course, that\u2019s not saying we will never support searching those items above, just that it will be very difficult with the current extensibility APIs in VS 2010.<\/p>\n<p>With Quick Access, our goal was to target two customer scenarios:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Discoverability:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know where a particular command, option, etc. is located.For example, maybe you can\u2019t remember where the bookmark window is located.\u00a0 Press <strong>Ctrl+3<\/strong>, type <em>\u201cbookmark\u201d<\/em> and Quick Access will send back any command where the search string matches.\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/08\/7127.image_thumb_6D72DE1F.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/08\/7127.image_thumb_6D72DE1F.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"389\" height=\"374\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n<li><strong>Shortcutting:<\/strong> I want to perform a task in VS more efficiently.\u00a0 In this scenario, you don\u2019t really <em>care <\/em>where a particular command, option, etc. is located, you just want to invoke it with a few keystrokes (this assumes you didn\u2019t know the keyboard shortcut for a particular command).For example, I want to view the Project Properties for my application.\u00a0 I type in <em>\u201cprop\u201d<\/em> and press <strong>Enter<\/strong> (if it\u2019s not in your Most Recently Used (MRU) bucket you may have to hit <strong>Down<\/strong> a few times, but once you activate it once it will appear in your MRU).\u00a0 Sure you can always double-click the Properties icon in Solution Explorer, but then you have to take your hands off the keyboard \ud83d\ude42\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/10\/7127.image_6C2E4540.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/08\/8623.image_thumb_4ACE9FA4.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"434\" height=\"374\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2>Tasks<\/h2>\n<p>You can look at tasks as \u201cscripts\u201d or \u201clight-weight macros\u201d.\u00a0 Through tasks, Quick Access provides you with the ability to interact with VS in a way that isn\u2019t normally exposed through menu commands.\u00a0 An example would be the task \u201cTurn line numbers on\u201d.\u00a0 Normally, you would have to change this option in the Tools \u2013&gt; Options dialog.\u00a0 With Quick Access, we could implement this task by executing a sequence of VS commands or even interact with the DTE.<\/p>\n<p>The current version of Quick Access ships with several tasks.\u00a0 To see the available tasks, search for \u201ctasks\u201d:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/10\/0601.image_4B2AACCC.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/08\/2744.image_thumb_49E613ED.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"434\" height=\"374\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the next release, we are planning to add support for you to author your own tasks.\u00a0 <strong>We will also implement the most commonly requested tasks into the package, so tell us what you\u2019d like to see. <\/strong><\/p>\n<h2>Some Other Stuff You May Be Interested In\u2026<\/h2>\n<p>Quick Access uses a model similar to the Windows Start Menu to only show a subset of the matching items when the list fills more than the tool window real-estate.\u00a0 That way, if you type \u201cdebug\u201d and really want the <em>Visual Studio Options <\/em>result, you don\u2019t have to scroll down through 14 menu items.\u00a0 If you want to see all the results, press <strong>Ctrl+3 <\/strong>again to show everything.\u00a0 Continue pressing <strong>Ctrl+3<\/strong> to filter on each category.<\/p>\n<table border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"2\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td valign=\"top\" width=\"387\"><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/10\/2313.image_6FCE9C70.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/08\/3312.image_thumb_520D11B1.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"387\" height=\"374\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td valign=\"top\" width=\"387\"><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/08\/0576.image_thumb_0E75608F.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-width: 0px;\" title=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/08\/0576.image_thumb_0E75608F.png\" alt=\"image\" width=\"387\" height=\"374\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>Let Us Know What You Think<\/h2>\n<p>As with all of the <a href=\"http:\/\/visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com\/en-us\/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef\">Productivity Power Tools<\/a> features, we want to know what you think.\u00a0 What do you like?\u00a0 What can we make better?<\/p>\n<p>We are also really interested in <em>how<\/em> you use or would like to use Quick Access<em>.<\/em>\u00a0 Is it to find a specific options page or something more involved such as executing tasks\/macros?<\/p>\n<p>Click the smiley face in the bottom right of the Quick Access window to send us mail.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks,<\/p>\n<p>Weston Hutchins\nProgram Manager \u2013 IDE Platform<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With last week\u2019s release of the Productivity Power Tools, we announced a new extension \u2013 Quick Access \u2013\u00a0that allows you to search and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE.\u00a0 You can launch Quick Access by pressing Ctrl+3, or by selecting View-&gt;Quick Access. Quick Access will allow you to search and execute: Menu Commands [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":255385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual-studio","tag-csharp"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>With last week\u2019s release of the Productivity Power Tools, we announced a new extension \u2013 Quick Access \u2013\u00a0that allows you to search and execute common tasks within the Visual Studio IDE.\u00a0 You can launch Quick Access by pressing Ctrl+3, or by selecting View-&gt;Quick Access. Quick Access will allow you to search and execute: Menu Commands [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}