Saturday, June 10, 2017

Changing Visual Studio keyboard shortcut for Comment and Uncomment

By Steve Endow

A very handy feature in Visual Studio is the Comment / Uncomment editing option.

There are two buttons that allow you to comment or uncomment code with a single click.


While those buttons are handy, they require you to use the mouse, and that can sometimes be tedious if you are having to also make multiple code selections with the mouse.

Visual Studio does have keyboard shortcuts for Comment and Uncomment, but they are the unfortunate double-shortcut combinations:  Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C to comment, and Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U to uncomment.

I find those shortcuts to be pretty annoying, as they require me to use both hands to press those key combinations.  It's not much of a "shortcut".

After several years of this nagging me, I finally bothered to lookup a better alternative.  Fortunately Visual Studio allows you to add your own keyboard shortcuts.  If you click on Tools -> Options, and then select Environment -> Keyboard, you can select a command and assign a new keyboard shortcut.

The one challenge is finding a decent keyboard shortcut that isn't already taken.

I entered the word "comment" and it displayed the relevant commands.  I then selected Edit.CommentSelection, selected Use new shortcut in Text Editor, pressed Alt+C, then clicked Assign.

Now I can comment a selection using the nice and simple Alt+C shortcut.  Big improvement.


I don't Uncomment as much, so for now I haven't assigned a custom shortcut to Edit.Uncomment, but at least I now know it's very easy to do.

Keep on coding...and commenting...



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