What is the command for block select in Visual Studio 2008

Question

In visual studio you can select a block of text by holding down <alt> when when selecting text with the mouse. This is very useful for selecting a column of data or text as opposed to the entire line.

In Visual Studio 2003-2005 this operation could be performed by holding <alt><shift> in conjunction with the arrow keys but the keyboard option no longer works in VS2008.

Can anyone tell me the editor command to assign to a keyboard shortcut? Is this keyboard shortcut just moved to something else in VS 2008?

Answer 1

The <alt><shift><arrow> key combination still works in VS2008 (at least it does in my default key mappings). It is possible that your key mappings are not set correctly to what you expect to work.

To manually set the key mappings, you need to look at Edit.LineUpExtendColumn, Edit.LineDownExtendColumn, Edit.CharLeftExtendColumn and Edit.CharRightExtendColumn in the keyboard settings and reassign them.

Answer 2

Right after I submitted this I was looking through the keyboard shortcuts and found the commands Adrian mentioned. By looking at how these are mapped and playing around a bit more I figured out how it is setup in the default profile for Team Suite.

To start a block select you press <alt><shift><home> or <alt><shift><end>. This highlights to the end of the line or the start of the line depending on what you pressed.

Thereafter <shift><arrow> and <ctl><shift><arrow>, can be used to expand the region as desired.