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:
To this:
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:
Keyboard
If you prefer to use the keyboard, you can always use CTRL+SHIFT+>[Greater Than] and CTRL+SHIFT+<[Less Than].
Comments
Anonymous
September 12, 2013
The comment has been removedAnonymous
September 12, 2013
Yea, I agree, it would be nice to have something like web browsers which use ctrl + 0Anonymous
September 12, 2013
Jeff / Matt :) There is no zoom back to 100% command that I am aware of in VS. I've been wanting this for a while now so I'll ping the team and see if this is something that could be implemented. ZAnonymous
November 07, 2013
The comment has been removedAnonymous
November 15, 2013
This is one of those death by a thousand cuts irritants thats been bugging me forever. Please consider making this a VS option as Dave suggests. I suspect that for every 1 person who likes it, there are 10^6 who don't.Anonymous
March 26, 2014
In Visual Studio 2013, adjusting zoom only affects the currently opened document. It would be nice if there was a way to set the default zoom level on newly opened documents. This would be particularly useful for coders with impaired eye sight. There have been extensions in previous version of Visual Studio to do this, but there is not one available for 2013.Anonymous
July 28, 2014
@John Madison Grant: The default font size for all text can be changed in the regular "Fonts and Colors" settings under Tools -> Options. It has been there forever.Anonymous
July 29, 2014
@Ross... Thanks! I found this post while looking for a default zoom setting... I had already searched the Options and overlooked the "Fonts and Colors". This worked perfectly for me!!Anonymous
January 19, 2015
What the .... is wrong with MS devs? Reset view with CTRL+0 still now available? It is 2015 !Anonymous
March 24, 2015
The comment has been removedAnonymous
April 28, 2015
If you use Visual Assist, assign Ctrl+0 to VAssistX.ResetEditorZoom.Anonymous
May 27, 2015
I love it... but yeah I found it by accident as I kept zooming during my scroll operations... hah. Agree though I wish it had been setup to work like the browsers with ctrl-0 as the reset.Anonymous
September 26, 2015
Congratulations on one of the stupidest features in the world. "People discover this by accident". No kidding. And then they are annoyed they can't figure out how to unzoom.Anonymous
September 26, 2015
I "discovered" this on a laptop.. and I don't even know what the equivalent of mouse wheel is. Can't turn it off now.Anonymous
November 07, 2015
As others have noted above, I am incredulous that this "feature" is included with no way to reset the view once zoom has (accidently) been changed.Anonymous
November 14, 2015
There is a dropdown on bottom left of the text editor. Select "100%", should do what you're asking.