Help me escape the quotes!

June 7, 2009 4:26 AM

Visual Studio 2008 IDE Question

I'm hoping this will just be a simple answer (and that it exists). I do a lot of C# coding in Visual Studio 2008. Intellisense makes me life a whole lot easier, however I can't seem to figure out how to do something that should, I feel, be obvious.

Say I'm trying to set the value of an attribute. If I type "Col" I get a drop-down list and I can choose "Color" and press tab and it will auto complete to Color="" with my cursor inside the quotes where I can start typing. Now this attribute happens to have predefined values, so that when I start typing, I'll get another drop-down list, and I can highlight say "Green" and hit tab. It will auto complete to Color="Green" and my cursor will be outside of the quotes and I can continue on my merry way.

If, however, the attribute I'm writing doesn't have predefined values, I run into a problem. I'll type something like "Prop" and then highlight Property and hit tab. It will auto complete to Property="" with my cursor inside the quotes. I'll type whatever, say FontWeight, and now my cursor is still inside the quotes. The only way I can manage to continue is to hit the right arrow key, or click to the right of the quote with my mouse. Both actions move my hand away from homerow and significantly interrupt work flow. So I'm wondering if, once I'm at the point of finishing typing FontWeight (or whatever situation I don't have a drop-down list), is there a shortcut keypress to jump to the right of the quote?

I realize that's a little nit-picky, but pressing something like ctrl+enter is infinitely more preferable than trying to press the right cursor arrow.

For what it's worth, I've been trying to play around with shortcuts. ctrl+shift+enter escapes the quotes, but also jumps down to the next line, leaving to press backspace a lot :-\

Thanks for any help, how the question is clear.

posted by sepsis to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I doubt this works with quotes, but if you wanted to keep the bit that you typed without it autocompleting to the first match (e.g., if you wanted Thing.Prop but it wanted to expand it to Thing.Property) you could hit Escape to have it stop trying to Autocomplete.

As I said, my guess is that it wouldn't put you outside of the quotes if they existed, but maybe it would...
posted by i love cheese at 6:08 AM on June 7

Type the closing double quote.
posted by Khalad at 7:21 AM on June 7

How about just "End"?
posted by XMLicious at 10:40 AM on June 7

I realize that's a little nit-picky, but pressing something like ctrl+enter is infinitely more preferable than trying to press the right cursor arrow.

I actually solved this problem by using AutoHotKey to remap my right side Alt and Ctrl keys to the left and right arrows. I rarely use Alt and Ctrl for anything other than cut/copy/paste/undo, and for all of those I do them left-handed (so that my right hand can use the mouse at the same time). You could also very easily map something like Ctrl+; as the right arrow key if that would be easier.
posted by burnmp3s at 4:59 PM on June 7

You could write a macro to do this and map it to whatever shortcut key you prefer.
posted by hAndrew at 10:44 PM on June 7

@Khalad: Typing the closing double quote just leaves me with 2 sets of double quotes. Is there a setting somewhere that changes this, because that would probably be ideal and makes the most sense to me?

@XMLicious: End is easier to press than the right cursor arrow, thanks!

@burnmp3s & hAndrew: I'd forgotten about AutoHotKey, that's probably what I'll end up doing once I decide what I'd want the shortcut key to be.
posted by sepsis at 11:59 PM on June 7