Is there a keyboard shortcut in Visual Studio (aside from CTRL+TAB and selection) that would take me from inside a document directly into the solution explorer? I don't want to customize any shortcuts or change any default behavior.
13 Answers
When using VS 2012 with the Visual C# 2005 keyboard mapping scheme:
CTRL+W, S
I find this easier to memorize: All shortcuts beginning with CTRL+W are for opening or navigating to W indows:
- CTRL+W, S: S olution Explorer
- CTRL+W, E: E rror list
- CTRL+W, R: R esourceview
- CTRL+W, A: Command window (A ction ...)
- CTRL+W, T: T askview
- CTRL+W, Q: Find Symbol Results
- CTRL+W, X: Toolbo x
- CTRL+W, C: C lassview
- CTRL+W, P: P roperties
- CTRL+W, B: B ookmarks
- ...
- shortcut ctrl [, S will focus current open file/document in solution explorer.
- setting checkbox to true in "Track active in Solution Explorer" will automatically focus current open file/document in solution explorer (Tools->Options->Projects and solutions->General->"Track Active Item in Solution Explorer"=true
Visual Studio
2015 and 2017 (by default) VS 2017 Shortcuts
Ctrl + [, S
Runs Keyboard Shortcut
SolutionExplorer.SyncWithActiveDocument
ReSharper
In Visual Studio 2015 and 2017 (by default) Resharper Docs
Shift + Alt + L
Which runs Resharper's Keyboard Shortcut
Resharper.Resharper_LocateInSolutionOrAssemblyExplorer
Both
- Focus Solution Explorer
- Highlight document
- Scroll / expand nodes (as required to show that document)
Difference
Resharper's version also works with decompiled code. Locating decompiled symbols in the Assembly Explorer window.
To customise / it doesn't work :
- Tools > Options > Environment > Keyboard
- Search shortcut name (e.g. SolutionExplorer.SyncWithActiveDocument)
- Assign (in Global) to Keyboard shortcuts as you like
I had this problem on a new machine build with VS 2013 and R# 8.2.
Keyboard option Resharper.Resharper_LocateInSolutionExplorer
was correctly set to Shift+Alt+L
, but it seemed to be only opening a parent folder and not selecting the actual file. As recommended in another post I enabled "Track active in Solution Explorer"
in the VS Options.
This didn't fix the problem and wasn't what I want because in very large solutions I don't want the solution explorer jumping around to the current file in use. I disabled the Track feature and restarted VS, the LocateInSolutionExplorer
feature then started working correctly. Some sort of shortcut precedence issue?
We just upgraded from VS2013 to VS2017, and I had to go looking for how to auto-select the active tab in the Solution Explorer. I often have to look for a document by finding a text-string from a screen, and love to have it select the document so I can see where it is.
Tracking the active document has been default behavior for a long time. VS2017 brought over ALL my other preferences, but not this one. Glad I found this thread--Thank you.
Ctrl+Alt+L works fine even in VS 2019.
But if you have reassigned the above key to some other command (by mistake in my case) then the name of the command is View.SolutionExplorer
You can search it in the Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard
or just do Ctrl+Q and search keymap
.
And then search View.SolutionExplorer
in the Show commands containing:
and assign whichever key you want.