Is there a keyboard shortcut to quickly find and open a file in Visual Studio 2005/2008 like how they do it in TextMate?

Question

Is there a keyboard shortcut to quickly find and open a file in Visual Studio 2005/2008 like how they do it in TextMate?

In textmate Command T in Textmate brings up something that you can type a few key which would display all relevant files and allow you to quickly select one, Command T back and forth also allows you to quickly alternate between 2 files most recently used. This is extremely helpful.

I am aware that there is a Ctrl-Alt-Down which shows a list of all open documents which is almost there but not quite. Cheers.

Answer 1

Sonic File Finder is a free VS plugin which is basically the same thing, and quite well-loved by most people who install it.

http://www.jens-schaller.de/sonictools/sonicfilefinder/index.htm

Answer 2

You can hit Ctrl+D to go to the search box, then type >of filename (with autocomplete).

You can also do this and other commands in the command window or the immediate window.

Or, if you don't mind buying, ReSharper has Go to File which I highly recommend. It's Ctrl+Shift+N and it brings up a nice search dialog that supports wildcards and other shortcuts.

Answer 3

If you go to the search box in visual studio and type ">open " and then start typing, autocomplete will come up for all the files in your solution. This is in 2008, not so sure about 2005.

Answer 4

Sara Ford has a blog post about this: Did you know... How to open a file in the solution without using either a tool window or a dialog?

All the previous responses are accurate and are mentioned in her post and the comments. In addition, another approach is to launch the command window using CTRL+ALT+A then typing in "of filename" or "open filename" in the same way mentioned for the search field.

@Adam Neal mentioned ReSharper. Another popular tool is CodeRush/Refactor! Pro and it also has a file navigation window that can be launched (and searched) via the CTRL+ALT+F shortcut.

Answer 5

Out of the box in Visual Studio, Ctrl+Tab will toggle between the two most recent files.

Ctrl+Shift+T in Resharper works just like you describe. It provides a text box in which you type the filename and it generates a live list from which you can pick from. Nice features include wildcarding (e.g. Customer*xaml) and matching on camel case filenames (e.g. SVD will match SingleValueDecomposition.cs). At my work, if people use one feature of Resharper, it will be Ctrl+Shift+T.

If you code in C++ rather than C#, then Visual Assist provides the some functionality. And in my opinion works better than Resharper.