Having guidelines in your code editor makes it a bit easier to maintain your code in a tidy manner. For Visual Studio 2010, I use these free extensions:
- Indent Guides by Steve Dower – displays indent guides in Visual Studio text editor windows.
- Editor Guidelines by Paul Harrington – adds vertical guidelines behind the text at user-specified column positions.
- Editor Guidelines UI by Paul Harrington – adds submenu with three commands to the code editor’s context menu (right click) for managing editor guidelines – no need to edit the registry for guidelines configuration anymore.
For Visual Studio 2008 and older, you have to use regedit. Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor
and add a string named Guides
with value RGB(0,255,0),80
to create a guideline after column 80. To get more guidelines e.g., after column 80 and 130, set the value to RGB(0,255,0),80,130
.
Note: Editor Guidelines extension for VS2010 uses a registry entry similar to the one described above, however its syntax is less strict. I found out on VS2008, that “Guides
” string value cannot contain any spaces.
Registry paths for various Visual Studio versions:
2003: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Text Editor 2005: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Text Editor 2008: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor 2008 Express: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCExpress\9.0\Text Editor
References