The same kind of functionality that you have in your browsers to quickly navigate between tabs using hotkeys like Ctrl + Tab, Ctrl + Shift + Tab, Ctrl + 1,2,3,4,…, is also present in Visual Studio. In this article I will show you some quick ways to navigate between tabbed documents in Visual Studio. I am using Visual Studio 2010, but I think these all ways will perfectly work with all the other versions of Visual Studio as well.
Instructions:
- If you have a number of document tabs opened in Visual Studio and you want to quickly navigate to the first or last tab, then you can use the shortcut keys Ctrl + Alt + Home to switch to first tab, and Ctrl + Alt + End to switch to last tab.
- If you want to cycle through opened tabs, then you can use the shortcut keys Ctrl + Tab (for clockwise rotation) or Ctrl + Shift Tab (for anti-clockwise rotation). when you press any of these shortcut, It will open a Navigation box, where you will clearly see that you are navigating between tabs, and when you are at your destination tab, just release the keys and that tab will get opened in Visual Studio.
- While Using upper shortcut keys, when you get Navigation box opened, you can release all the keys except Ctrl key, which will make this navigation box to stay open and you will not be navigating through tabs. Now you can directly click on any tab to open that in Visual Studio from the list of tabs shown in that Navigation box. You can also click on any Tool Window as well from the list to open that in Visual Studio in your current tab.
- You can also use Ctrl + F6 (clockwise rotation) or Ctrl + Shift + F6 (anti-clockwise rotation) hotkeys to directly switch through tabs in Visual Studio. This time, Visual Studio won’t show you any Navigation box, but will make you to switch through tabs.
