As I’ve spent much of my career using Visual Studio and its various incarnations, I’ve become quite used to using all the keyboard shortcuts to reduce the time I spend using the mouse.

As result of keyboard shortcuts, there are a lot of menu bars and windows on the screen that I just don’t need.  The image in this post is of Internet Explorer.  Web browsers have suffered from this problem for a long time as well:  if you look at the image, you will see that almost a third of the image is taken up by search bars and menus that are practically unused.

The same is true in Visual Studio.  The default settings are to give you just about every window possible (Output, Solution Explorer, etc.), in addition to lots of menu bars:  ‘Edit’ – is there a developer out there that doesn’t know Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+Y, Ctrl+Z?  The amount of area for writing code seems to be 50% or less of the IDE window.

My settings are now:

• No menu bars except for a custom one that changes build configuration (release/debug), and has ‘build’ and ‘rebuild’ solution.
• One docked vertical window that contains the ‘Solution Explorer’.
• One minimized docked horizontal window with tabs for Output and Find.
• And one large window for editing code, as nature intended.

It isn’t just Visual Studio that suffers from this, take a look at Eclipse:

Once again, the code editor takes up about 50% of the available space.

There are benefits and drawbacks to increasing your editor size.  The drawbacks are that, perhaps, some of the windows and menu bars you are doing without, you need more than you realise. With more screen real estate for your editor you can view more of your code with less scrolling.  The other choice is that you can now increase the font size, making the coding easier on the eye (quite literally less strain whilst looking at your monitor).