Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Extend/Reduce selection

You often need to extend the selection to the parent context. For instance, if your cursor is in a string, you can select the whole string in a single shortcut.

Press Alt+Shift+= to extend the selection and Alt+Shift+- reduce the selection:

You can also select the containing block using ALT+SHIFT+]

This post is part of the series 'Visual Studio Tips and Tricks'. Be sure to check out the rest of the blog posts of the series!

• View and edit the Tab Order of Windows Forms Controls
• Comparing files using Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Clipboard history
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Open recently closed files
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Multi-line and multi-cursor editing
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Extend/Reduce selection (this post)
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Undock/Re-dock a tool window
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Regex editing
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Find the current opened file in the solution explorer
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Default startup project
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Open the documentation of a symbol
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Paste as JSON
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Add project reference using drag & drop
• Visualizing the code coverage results from Azure Pipelines in Visual Studio
• Debugging a .NET assembly without the source code with Visual Studio
• Visual Studio Tips and tricks: Subword navigation

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