Thursday, April 09, 2020

Navigate between files of different languages in Visual Studio

Visual Studio has great tooling for navigating within code when it is in the same (programming) language.
However, if your solution contains code in more than one language and you want a quick way to navigate between files you're out of luck. Until now!

Presenting: Comment Links
Yes, it's (another) new Visual Studio 2019 extension. This one lets you put links between files anywhere in your code. In theory, this could be anywhere in your code, but in comments makes the most sense. Just include the text `link:` (case-insensitive) followed by the file name.


A green button with an arrow on it will, when clicked, open the named file.

You can also have the file open on a specific line by including the line number after `#L` at the end of the file name.

// link:mapManager.js#L25

 Or you can jump to the first occurrence of a specific piece of text

// link:mapManager.js:UpdateLocalData

For compatibility with text fragment anchors you can also use `#:~:text=` after the file name to specify the text.

// link:mapManager.js#:~:text=UpdateLocalData


Version 1.0 is in preview and available from the Visual Studio Marketplace now.
Please give it a try and tell me what you think or suggest new features on GitHub.


This project was the result of a comment from one of my GitHub sponsors. If you join them I'm likely to take any suggestions you make more seriously. ;)

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