Tuesday, March 16, 2010

New CodeRush Plugin: DX_DirectOptions


This is a very simple plugin that I developed, like most of DX_DirectOptionsmy plugins, to help me save some time. In this case it’s a very small amount of time.

In 90%+ of all cases when I’m loading the CodeRush options screen, I want to use either the “Templates” or the “Shortcuts” pages.

Therefore I have created a plugin which does nothing more than provide actions and menu options to launch each of these directly.

Simply install the plugin in the usual way and then restart either the DXCore or Visual studio.

When the restart is complete, you should have 2 additional menu options in your DevExpress menu.

[Note: The “Templates Options” menu item will only be present if you have the full CodeRush, or a trial of same, installed.]

Additionally these actions exist in their own right allowing you to bind a key to them if you want to. Their names are “ShowTemplateOptions” and “ShowShortcutOptions” respectively.

[As above: If you only have CodeRush Xpress installed, then the “ShowTemplateOptions” action will not have registered itself and will not be available.]

This plugin still loads the other options pages, but will ensure that the page you indicated is the one selected.

For more details, see the DX_DirectOptions’ wiki page

Update:
I'm considering placing these entries on their own submenu. I can envisage a scenario where other options pages get nominated for this and the list of entries on the DevExpress menu gets a bit overwhelming. I would supply an options page myself for picking which of these might show up in the menu.

Also It’s been suggested that these menu options should perhaps have their own Accelerator keys

Thoughts?


6 comments:

Jorge Rowies said...

As usual, a very handy plugin, thanks!

Anonymous said...

Great idea! Thanks Rory!

Anonymous said...

Splitting in to configurable sub menus sounds like a good idea Rory.

ctrl-shift-alt-t for templates,
ctrl-shift-alt-s for shortcuts

Rory said...

I think perhaps you misunderstand me.. I was wondering which key from within the phrases 'template' and 'shortcut' would make good keys to turn into accelerators.

[Note: When you prefix a character in the caption of a menu with and ampersand (&), that key becomes the one which will trigger the menu item, assuming that the menu is visible when the key is pressed.]

I don't want to clash with the other menu items already on that menu.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, I had two separate thoughts and didn't explain the second thought. The second one was just assigning two separate key combinations to directly access the new items (ie. not using the menus at all) similar to using ctrl+alt+shft+o to open the devexpress options .

I was thinking of something of the two key combos for directly accessing the templates and shortcuts, I am not even sure if that's possible though.

Rory said...

Unfortunately there is no way for me to default these keystroke for you.

Luckily the facility already exists for you to bind these yourself.

See the paragraph starting "Additionally these actions exist"