Code & Sundry

Jon G Stødle

Visual Studio Code Completion Shortcut

243 words, 2 minutes to read

I’ve never appreciated Intellisense in Visual Studio as much as I do now. Intellisense is the code completion technology present in the Visual Studio family of products. After using Xcode for a little while, and it’s atrocious code completion, I can truly appreciate Intellisense in it’s full glory.

Anyway, back to the shortcut with Intellisense: If you’re working with an API that has a lot of classes starting with the same name (I’m looking at you ReactiveUI); or you’ve ended up with at lot of fields or properties starting the same, you might have come across the situation where you end up typing the same thing over and over to get the right element.

Let’s say you have this list of fields:

  • NameContainerGrid
  • NameTextBlock
  • NameTextBox
  • NameCheckButton

You could type “name” every time you access these fields:

all-letters-2015

Or you can just type the capital letters of the name of the field (or property/class) and skip over the lowercase letters to get to the part of the name that’s unique:

capital-letters-2015

In Visual Studio 2017 this is made even better as Intellisense highlights the part of the name it’s matched to your input:

capital-letters-2017

This means you can reach MainWindowViewModel quickly by typing “MWVM” and hitting enter/space or any of the other characters which completes the suggestion.

Happy coding!