Visual Studio Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 10. Add Guidelines to the Text Editor

If you've got to have
everything line up just right, turn on guidelines and get everything
pixel perfect.

One of the features missing from
the text editor in Visual Studio is the ability to add
vertical guidelines. Vertical guidelines
are thin vertical lines that can be used as visual guides when
aligning text. This feature is not actually missing
thoughusing a simple registry hack, you can add up to 13
different guidelines to Visual Studio's text editor.

When editing the registry, you should always back up your registry or use the alternative registry method [Hack #30] .

To add guidelines:

Close Visual Studio.

Open regedit (Start Run
type regedit).

Navigate to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<7.1>\Text
Editor.

Right-click on the Text Editor key and choose New String
Value and name it "Guides".

Set the value of the guides to RGB(128, 128, 128) 4,
16.

The first part of the value sets the color of the guidelines using
common red, green, and blue values. 128, 128, and 128 sets the color
of the guidelines to gray. The second numbers specify where the
guidelines should appear. In this example, guidelines will be shown
at the 4-space mark as well as the 16-space mark. You can add up to
13 different guidelines by simply adding more numeric values
separated by commas.

After you have created your registry entry, you will see guidelines
in the marks specified when you launch Visual Studio. Figure 2-21 shows an example of the results from the
example settings.

Figure 2-21. Guidelines in Visual Studio

Removing these guidelines is simply a matter of deleting the Guides
registry key and restarting Visual Studio.

Guidelines are easy to add and can be very useful when trying to keep
your code organized. Thanks to Sara Ford for posting about this
hidden feature on her blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford.