General, Text Editor, Options Dialog Box

This dialog box lets you change global settings for the Visual Studio Code and Text Editor. To display this dialog box, click Options on the Tools menu, expand the Text Editor folder, and then click General.

Note

The dialog boxes and menu commands you see might differ from those described in Help depending on your active settings or edition. To change your settings, choose Import and Export Settings on the Tools menu. For more information, see Visual Studio Settings.

Settings

• Go to selection anchor after escape
  When selected, pressing the ESC key undoes the selection and moves the insertion point in the editor to the position where the current selection began.

• Drag and drop text editing
  When selected, enables you to move text by selecting it and dragging it with the mouse to another location within the current document or any other open document.

• Include insertion point movements in Undo list
  When selected, commands that move the insertion point are tracked in the Undo list. As a result, you can move to previous locations by choosing Undo from the Edit menu, and selecting entries from the Undo list.

• Automatic delimiter highlighting
  When selected, delimiter characters that separate parameters or item-value pairs, as well as matching braces, are highlighted.

• Track changes
  When selected, the code editor's selection margin displays a vertical yellow line to mark code recently changed, and vertical green lines next to unchanged code.

• Auto-detect UTF-8 encoding without signature
  By default, the editor detects encoding by searching for byte order marks or charset tags. If neither is found in the current document, the code editor attempts to auto-detect UTF-8 encoding by scanning byte sequences. To disable the auto-detection of encoding, clear this option.

Display

• Selection margin
  When selected, displays a vertical margin along the left edge of the editor's text area. You can click this margin to select an entire line of text, or click and drag to select consecutive lines of text.

  Selection Margin on	Selection Margin off

• Indicator margin
  When selected, displays a vertical margin outside the left edge of the editor's text area. When you click in this margin, an icon and ToolTip that are related to the text appear. For example, breakpoint or task list shortcuts appear in the indicator margin. Indicator Margin information does not print.

• Vertical scroll bar
  When selected, displays a vertical scrollbar which allows you to scroll up and down to view elements that fall outside the viewing area of the Editor. If vertical scrollbars are not available, you can use the Page Up, Page Down and cursor keys to scroll.

• Horizontal scroll bar
  When selected, displays a horizontal scrollbar which allows you to scroll from side-to-side to view elements that fall outside the viewing area of the Editor. If horizontal scrollbars are unavailable, you can use the cursor keys to scroll.

Related Options Dialogs

Several other Options dialogs offer additional settings that can help you configure the editors of the integrated development environment (IDE) to your needs:

• General, All Languages, Text Editor, Options Dialog Box, Tabs, All Languages, Text Editor, Options Dialog Box
  Lets you set or reset common Options for all development languages.

• Text Editor Options for Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, HTML, XML, and so on.
  Let you configure options for the Code Editor that apply while you are editing code in a specific development language.

• File Extension, Text Editor, Options Dialog Box
  Lets you specify the editor used to open documents with certain file extensions, and to choose editor emulations.

• Keyboard, Environment, Options
  Lets you select and edit a Keyboard mapping scheme. Type Edit in the Show commands field to list available editing commands and their shortcuts.

See Also

Concepts

Customizing the Editor

Reference

General, Environment, Options Dialog Box

Other Resources

Using IntelliSense