F.1 Global Settings

A few text editor settings are global (i.e., they cannot be changed per language). These can be edited by selecting the General item in the Text Editor category. The first four govern the editor's behavior:

Go to selection anchor after escape

Determines whether the Esc key causes the cursor to move to the start or end of the current selection. The default (off) behavior is for the cursor to move to the end of the selection.

Drag-and-drop text editing

Enables dragging and dropping chunks of text.

Include insertion point movements in undo list

Determines whether cursor movements (performed with either the mouse or the arrow keys) are included in the undo/redo history.

Automatic delimiter highlighting

Controls whether matching pairs of delimiter characters are highlighted. (For example, if this option is enabled, when you close a bracket the editor will highlight the matching opening bracket.)

The next four settings change the appearance of the editor:

Selection margin

Controls the display of a vertical margin on the left side of the text editor. When enabled, you can use this margin to select a whole line of text (rather than having to select the whole line manually). This margin also includes controls that you can use to collapse and expand classes, methods, and regions.

Indicator margin

Controls the display of the indicator margin, which is the gray margin on the left side of the text editor where breakpoint and bookmark symbols appear.

Vertical scrollbar

Determines whether a vertical scrollbar appears on the right side of the text editor pane. (You can still use documents larger than the screen even without a scrollbar of course—you just have to use the keyboard for navigation.)

Horizontal scrollbar

Determines whether a horizontal scrollbar appears on the bottom of the text editor pane.

F.1.1 Fonts and Colors

The fonts and colors used by the text editor are configured globally—you cannot specify per-language settings. These settings live in a slightly different place from the other editor settings—they are in with all the other font and color selections for Visual Studio .NET. They are still in the Options dialog box, but you must select the Environment folder in the lefthand pane and then select Fonts and Colors.

To change the settings for the text editor, select Text Editor in the Show Settings For combo box. You can select only one font, but you can select the color for each different kind of text recognized by the editor. The different types of text are listed in the Display Items listbox. You may specify different foreground and background colors for each type of text.