Visual-studio – the command for block select in Visual Studio 2008

editorkeyboard shortcutsvisual studio

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?

Best Answer

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.