Friday, May 23, 2014

Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools 2013 adds "syntactic line compression" (think "Lossless 25% more visible lines for free")

The Visual Studio Blog - Announcing Update to Productivity Power Tools 2013

Today, we’re releasing an update to Productivity Power Tools 2013 on the Visual Studio Gallery. In this release, we fixed a number of customer-reported bugs and issues, and introduced a new feature called syntactic line compression.

Syntactic line compression enables you to make better use of your screen’s vertical real-estate. It shrinks lines that contain neither letters nor numbers by 25% vertically, allowing more lines to be displayed in the editor. Other lines are not affected.

Here’s an illustration of the same code before and after the feature is applied. You can see the extra lines you can get in the same space with no loss of content:

image

As with all Productivity Power Tools features, if you don’t like it you can turn it on and off in Tools…Options…Editor…

Now that's an interesting feature. We keep the whitespace yet also reclaim a little of our vertical screen space. Nice!

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