For starters, I’m not a huge user of shortcuts. Aside from your standard cut, copy, paste, undo, and redo, there aren’t that many shortcuts that I use on a regular basis.  However, there have been several times while developing when have I realized that I could save quite a bit of time by creating my own shortcut to do something in Visual Studio.  For example, I wanted to go through 20 or so files and use the Remove and Sort Usings feature, which is buried under 3 sub-menus and has no native shortcut (too much mouse movement!).

It turns out that Visual Studio lets you customize shortcuts for thousands of different commands throughout the application. To do this, go to:

Tools -> Options, then Environment -> Keyboard:

Visual Studio Options dialog

By default, the shortcut will be available globally throughout the entire application. If you want your shortcut to be available only for a specific feature, you can adjust this using the “Use shortcut in:” drop-down list.

There is also a way that you can export all of your custom shortcuts to share them with others or to move them to another environment.  Pretty sweet!  See the MSDN documentation for more information.

So there you have it!  Such a great way to save time and avoid the monotony of redundant tasks.  Happy shortcutting!