Options, Text Editor, General

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.

Settings

• 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.

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

• Track changes
  When the code editor is selected, a vertical yellow line appears in the selection margin to mark code that has changed since the file was most recently saved. When you save the changes, the vertical lines become green.

• 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.

• Highlight current line
  When selected, displays a gray box around the line of code in which the cursor is located.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Work with Keyboard Shortcuts

Reference

Options, Text Editor, All Languages

Options, Text Editor, All Languages, Tabs

Options, Text Editor, File Extension

Concepts

Customizing the Editor

Other Resources

Using IntelliSense