Use Symbol Hound to search for symbols

I stumbled upon this little gem, a search engine called Symbol Hound that unlike Google, doesn't ignore symbols in fast it is actually optimised for searching with them. It only searches within Stack Overflow but that means it's very focused on programming and really if you're not finding your answer to a programming operator question on SO, it deserves to be asked.

For a long time now I've searched Google using quotes around the term for things like C# "+= operator" hoping that it would work this time. Finally searching for symbols should be a breeze :)

Select a file in solution explorer without previewing in Visual Studio 2012

One of the new features in VS2012 is the ability to 'preview' a file instead of opening it fully which will open it in the 'preview' pane (docked to the right). To do this Left click on the file in the solution explorer. The great thing about it is that you can only have one preview open at a time. So when you're searching for something looking through several files in the process, the ones that aren't needed will close themselves.

As cool as it is, it started to annoy me after a while as I click in the solution explorer to enable scrolling if I'm out of Visual Studio. If it happens to be a large file it can take a second or two to load. So I went looking for a solution and it didn't take long to find one. Alt + Left click in the solution explorer will not show a preview of the file.

Go to active document in Visual Studio 2012 solution explorer

Finally! Visual Studio natively supports jumping to the active document in the solution explorer with Visual Studio 2012. The command is called "Sync with Active Document" and can be accessed from the Solution Explorer toolbar.

The default shortcut is Ctrl + [, S and can be customised by modifying the SolutionExplorer.SyncWithActiveDocument command in keyboard options (Tools -> Customise -> Keyboard)

Debug JavaScript using event listener breakpoints

Have you ever started working on a giant project containing many JavaScript files and needed to find out what some random button is doing? A pretty easy way to find out is to enable the mouse click's event listener breakpoint in the Chrome developer tools. This will break execution when you next click on the page allowing you to step into the code seeing exactly what is happening.

To set an event breakpoint hit F12 to open the developer tools, go to the Sources tab and check one of the events on the right sidebar.

Chrome (23) allows you to break on several events in each of the the following event groupings:

• Animation
• Control
• Clipboard
• DOM mutation
• Device
• Keyboard
• Load
• Mouse
• Timer
• Touch

Windows 8 hidden shortcut to system-ey things

You can access a menu in Windows 8 that gives you access to all sorts of system-related things by bringing the cursor to the start menu hotspot (bottom-left corner of the screen) and right-clicking.

It looks like you can get to it pretty much any time except for while in a full-screen desktop app (like games) which seem to have quite a few problems for people not familiar with hotkeys.

Type ? to view hotkeys in Google services

A handy little trick that's global to most of Google's core services. Press Shift + / (?) or Ctrl + / to display an overlay containing the hotkeys for the application. To hide it you can repeat the hotkey, press Esc or click off the overlay.

Having an easy to learn shortcut that's common across services is a really nice feature for the power user who wants to learn all of the hotkeys.

Here is the overlay for Drive.

Use prettyprint in the Chrome debugger

In version 12 of Chrome they added the ability to de-obfuscate (un-minify?) the JavaScript on the sources tab by right clicking the code area. Today that feature lives on in the "pretty print" feature located at the curly brace icon on the bottom of the debugger.

Removing an annoying entry from autocomplete

How often does this happen to you?

You start typing one of your commonly used web sites only to have your browser autocomplete to something a URL you don't want. It gets frustrating when you have to select the correct item over and over again.

There a little trick you can use in Chrome and Firefox to get around this annoyance:

• Start typing the URL
• Select the unwanted autocomplete entry
• Hit shift + delete to remove the entry from autocomplete

It shouldn't bother you again.