Visual Studio 2013: Zooming In and Out of Text in the Editor

This week I thought we would focus on some fun quickies that have been in Visual Studio since at least VS2010. The first one we will look at is simply zooming your text in the editor. The concept is really simple. For example, you may want to go from this:

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To this:

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Being able to zoom in and out is useful if you have trouble seeing or you are doing extreme programming or any situation where making text more readable is necessary. One other thing to keep in mind is that zooming is a per tab activity so zooming in one tab does not set the same zoom level in other tabs. Each tab has it's own zoom level.

 

 

Mouse Wheel

You can zoom in and out of text using the wheel on your mouse. Just hold down CTRL+Mouse Wheel and you can instantly zoom in and out of text in the editor.

 

Most people discover this accidentally. If this annoys you then you can see if there is an update to the Disable Mouse Wheel Zoom extension:

https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d088791c-150a-4834-8f28-462696a82bb8

 

At the time of writing there isn’t a version that works with VS2013 but that could change.

 

 

Combo Box

You can go “old school” and use the combo box at the bottom left of the IDE:

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Keyboard

If you prefer to use the keyboard, you can always use CTRL+SHIFT+>[Greater Than] and CTRL+SHIFT+<[Less Than].