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In Eclipse, there are two distinct features: one to format a selection, one to just indent the lines, see e.g. Difference between Ctrl+Shift+F and Ctrl+I in Eclipse. I found the format feature in Visual Studio but how can I actually just indent the lines? Is there some built-in command for that or possibly a 3rd party add-on?

Note: I have asked a couple of friend that use VS daily and they all tried to persuade me that I am looking for the format feature. No I'm not. I tried to live with it for a while and it is just a different feature. I am after the indent/reindent only.

EDIT: I am looking for a clever indent, sometimes called reindent, which is different to just pressing Tab or Shift+Tab (increase/decrease indent level). The indent feature in Eclipse behaves like this:

  • It places a beginning of current line at the right position, no matter where that line was starting before. So instead of thinking whether you need to increase or descrease the indent level (Tab or Shift+Tab), you just invoke the indent command and it will do the right thing.
  • Invoking the indent command on an empty line places the caret at the right position for the user to start typing.
  • It never influences any character beyond the first non-whitespace character.
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Borek Bernard
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2 Answers2

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If you just want to indent some lines, you can

  1. Select them.

  2. Press Tab.

To un-indent them, replace the second step to: Shift+Tab.

enter image description here

You can find more VS shortcuts here.

herohuyongtao
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  • Sorry I probably was not entirely clear, I am not after the increase/decrease indent level shortcuts, I want the same functionality as Eclipse provides under Ctrl+I. I have updated the question. – Borek Bernard Feb 25 '14 at 18:24
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There are toolbar buttons for this, with wonderfully inconsistent labels (at least in the Visual Studio 2013 I'm using)...

In the "Text Editor" toolbar (in my default setup), I have to buttons whose tooltips are:

  • "Decrease Line Indent"
  • "Increase Line Indent"

In the "Customize" dialog, on the "Commands" tab (with "Toolbar" set to "Text Editor") they appear in the list as:

  • "Line Unindent"
  • "Line Indent"

And finally, if you press the "Add Command..." button (on the "Customize" dialog) to produce the "Add Command" dialog and select the "Edit" category, you'll see these two entries:

  • "Outdent"
  • "Indent"

As far as I can tell, these are all the same two commands, which should do what you want.

They also appear in the Edit -> Advanced menu, at the very bottom.

----- Edit -----

I believe you might be able to turn off all of the "formatting" actions except for indentation, so that when you use the "auto-format" command, only the indentation is "formatted" for you. (Of course this prevents you from ever using the rest of the formatting features without turning them on again, but if you don't use them, this might work!)

aldo
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  • Sorry I probably was not entirely clear, I am not after the increase/decrease indent level shortcuts, I want the same functionality as Eclipse provides under Ctrl+I. I have updated the question. – Borek Bernard Feb 25 '14 at 18:25
  • Regarding your edit, for instance HTML does not have any formatting settings so I cannot turn off everything except indentation :( This feature area is really badly designed in Visual Studio. – Borek Bernard Feb 26 '14 at 10:32