I put together a list of options you can set to remove all the Visual clutter from Visual Studio 2015:

https://jackmott.github.io/progra.../07/11/decruft-visual-studio.html

Where's the hide menu bar option?

Good post.

One problem I have with Visual Studio is that side-by-side editing is a pain without keyboard shortcut to switch between tab groups. I'd just like to be able to switch between right and left code tab groups using keyboard shortcut, but I haven't found a way of doing it. Without that the extra space goes largely unused for me. Are you aware of any way to do this? I like having debugger so closely integrated to my editor and that is the only reason I still use Visual Studio, but I wish the editor part of it was more configurable.

that tab group issue is my biggest gripe as well. some vs devs on twitter got wind of it so maybe in vs15 it will happen. in the meantime i want to see if an extension could do it.

I've been using this extension (Github). Works well enough. I have keybindings for cycling through tabs in a group, moving tabs to adjacent groups, and jumping between groups all bound to Left/Right Arrows and different combinations of modifier keys. This was definitely one of the more noticeable productivity improvements for me.

I had *just* tried that and it didn't work. Let me try again.
EDIT: it works!

I was looking into few plugins but none of them did what I wanted. It seems that I didn't look hard enough. This does exactly what I wanted. Thanks for the plugin link.

We should give the guy some positive reviews:
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn....55015-41c3-47db-b25b-45e00c107875

let the world know!

No, CNTRL-F6 doesn't work. F6 works if you have one code file split into two panes, but that is different than two tab groups.

CNTRL-F6 seems to cycle through open documents, so it might work if you only had 1 document open in each tab group.


as an aisde - CNTRL-K CNTRL-O will hop between header and its source file in C/CPP projects. Which is super handy.

I don't know if it's of any help, but you can use "Edit > Navigate to..." to switch between files. There is a hotkey to call it, on my keyboard layout (azerty fr-be) it's ctrl + ',' so it might be ctrl + 'm' (or the key at the right of 'n') on qwerty layouts.

- You'll need to type part of the name of the file you want to switch to;
- it lists other things than files;
- it's slow.

mrmixer
I don't know if it's of any help, but you can use "Edit > Navigate to..." to switch between files. There is a hotkey to call it, on my keyboard layout (azerty fr-be) it's ctrl + ',' so it might be ctrl + 'm' (or the key at the right of 'n') on qwerty layouts.

- You'll need to type part of the name of the file you want to switch to;
- it lists other things than files;
- it's slow.

That is a nice tip, thanks.

If your dead set on using Visual Studio then I highly recommend you get either ReSharper or Visual Assist, they do everything you asked for, and either everything that Casey does with emacs or just about. Only problem is they are not free although VA is a bit cheaper. I use VA at home and ReSharper at work.

LordRhys
If your dead set on using Visual Studio then I highly recommend you get either ReSharper or Visual Assist, they do everything you asked for, and either everything that Casey does with emacs or just about. Only problem is they are not free although VA is a bit cheaper. I use VA at home and ReSharper at work.

I've used it in the past. I can't stand the performance hit, and the last 2 years most of the features I liked about resharper are now part of visual studio natively, so there isn't much benefit.

If you like some of the static analysis type features of resharper, you might give this a try:
http://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio/

Their C# support is coming along nicely.