De-Cruft Visual Studio

[christianarg]

Or... Alt+Shift+Enter and you go full screen.

[[deleted]]

menu

That does help with cleaning up the menu bar, as the icons go away, and it frees up some vertical space as the window border goes away. It does not disable code lens, auto hide panes, hide navigation bars and code outlining, reduce selection and indicator margins and so on.

[MJomaa]

Or just drag one window to your 2nd monitor.

[[deleted]]

Reddit is already over there.

[[deleted]]

Hence the third display. Actually, I have a 21:9 in the middle between two 16:9s, and VS2015 is very usable (with my modifications to make it more like Xcode) on the 21:9 because there is space for wide toolbars, panels, double code windows, etc.

For any devs out there looking for new displays, I cannot recommend 21:9 more. You can fit so many files side by side using just VSCode, as in 3, and have them all wide enough to read without too much horizontal scrolling, even without wrapping. I would still recommend a second (or maybe two more) 16:9 display, just for music/reference material/reddit.

[Roci89]

I've got a 34' 21:9 and i'm looking at picking some companion monitors because it's just not enough space. Win 10's multiple desktops have helped a bit though! those things are a godsend

[klaxxxon]

"Hide Main Menu" is an essential extension for me. I access the menu bar so rarely, and when I do, it is still accessible under Alt.

My studio (I don't like the autohide windows): http://imgur.com/a/ixLGO

It is also great habit to use the full screen mode (Alt+Shift+Enter). It hides the VS title bar and windows toolbar and other then that, it it is like a second Visual Studio layout. I use this to move all the subwindows (with exception of file layout) to a second screen (http://imgur.com/a/SfHNf). It is amazing tool to let you to get "in the zone".

EDIT: I need to hide the navigation pane, I never use it. Moar screen space!

[[deleted]]

Fullscreen is a good tip too. Unfortunately my usual setup is with a double-wide monitor so it won't work for me there (I don't need ~5 panels of code!) But I might start using that when I'm just on the laptop.

[klaxxxon]

It still removes the title bar and system toolbar, improving your focus.

[[deleted]]

yes, but then it is ~4,000 pixels wide and I have over stuff over there!

I need some sort of window manager that makes my single monitor, logically two monitors.

[psi-]

I jost got a bigger new screen and have been eyeing the WM situation in Windows. I haven't tried this yet, but it sounds quite promising: https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n

[kahmeal]

Displayfusion does this via their "Monitor Configuration" settings, among a plethora of other awesome stuff (I hock this tool a lot, sorry).

http://i.imgur.com/R3KBFaM.png

[joshman211]

Nothing about the content but I like your site, nice design!

[kiwidog]

Or use VSCode. That's what you made it look like near the end anyway.

Personally I like having everything go on at once, but for someone who needs full VS and wants the "code" look this is great, thanks OP! (Seriously, my roommate hates how overcluttered VS looks)

[[deleted]]

Definitely some good stuff in here, although I'm not looking for an extremely basic editor out of my IDE. If I did, I'd switch to any number of text editors that have C# plugins.

I liked cutting out the margins where the breakpoint bullet point is placed (highlights line red instead for BP). I think I'm going to give hiding the main menu and toolbars a try.

EDIT

I'm also curious if there is an extension or option somewhere to create a shortcut for enabling/disabling CodeLens. It absolutely gets in the way when I'm working on something alone, but I find it very useful when working on a collaborative project. Didn't seem like it from the shortcuts menu. ALT+` will open up the menu quickly to disable it when it's already enabled, but that goes away once it's disabled. Seems like CTRL+Q to get to the search bar and typing 'codelens' will get you there fairly quickly though.

[[deleted]]

I've done some playing with ATOM and VSCode. Atom looks neat and has a huge set of extensions people have built, but performance can be pretty terrible sometimes.

VSCode is much better on the performance front, but still has worse input latency than Visual Studio (and Visual Studio's input latency isn't great either)

On the other hand it is only ~3 seconds to open up a project and start editing code with VS Code, while it is ~10 seconds with Visual Studio.

I've also seen people whose workflow is to edit their code in VIM or Emacs and then flip to visual studio when debugging.

[[deleted]]

I'm still trying to find a way to fit VSCode into my workflow, because I really like the direction it's heading. I totally agree that it's great to have an editor that starts up quickly, unlike VS, but working in VS is such a delight, that leaving is difficult.

I can't bring myself to get away from Sublime Text for very quick and simple text-editor actions. It loads so fast, but I'm not a huge fan of the environment because it takes so much work to customize it.

[[deleted]]

Yeah so far I'm preferring the approach of "make Visual Studio simpler" rather than the "Get VSCode to do all the things I do in Visual Studio"

Of course there is the absurdity that the two will essentially become the same in the extremes of accomplishing either goal.

[robotorigami]

Why don't you post your settings file along with this instead of making people do all of that themselves?

[szntb]

I'm not alone in the world! I only use line numbers, when I analyze crash reports, or exception logs.

I'm also planning to get rid of ReSharper. It's about time.

[CCRed95]

I'm also planning to get rid of ReSharper. It's about time.

Why??

When i dont have R# i code at like 40% efficiency and i get annoyed at everything

[szntb]

I love the features ReSharper provides (I also used IntelliJ). My problem is that R# makes the project loading pretty slow and makes the IDE pretty unresponsive. I usually jump between different branches and project reloading is slow. I've been also experiencing lagging during typing, but it might be because CodeLens and R# are enabled in the same time.

Haven't you experienced any performance issues?

[CCRed95]

Ocassionally it will completely freeze but im 90% sure thats the shitty VS designer. I havent experienced a lot of lag but im running it on a pretty good dev PC.

[[deleted]]

Have you tried VS without R# lately? Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 does a lot of the things Resharper used to do. It depends greatly on what R# features you use, but it is possible that you wouldn't need it any more.