Productivity Power Tools Used to Fix Itself (@tasks rocks)

The Productivity Power Tools extension is one of those must haves in Visual Studio, especially if you are showing Visual Studio as a presenter. Typing PresentOn in the Quick Launch (CTRL+Q) box makes the IDE font, menu items, and dialog text bigger so everything in the IDE is easier to see. My life is good with the Visual Studio 2013 Productivity Power Tools except something got messed up and I was permanently stuck in PresentOn. No amount of PresentOff in the Quick Launch would reset any fonts back to the defaults. While I could live with the big fonts on my big monitors, I just couldn’t let the bug go and had to see if I could fix it.

My first thought was to fire up the wonderful Sysinternals Process Monitor to look at which registry keys the Productivity Power Tools was setting. Before I did that I thought look at the Productivity Power Tools page and read the documentation, which is on the download page. A quick look through the Quick Launch Tasks Extensions section pointed me right at EnvFontReset, which “Resets all environment font settings to their default values (based on current theme).” Popping that into the Quick Launch after a PresentOff to ensure I had present mode off, fixed my enlarged font problem. Sometimes reading the documentation is really all you need to fix a bug.

The Productivity Power Tools add 33 additional Quick Tasks and while PresentOn and PresentOff will always be my favorites, LineNumOn and LineNumOff are two I’m using all the time these days. So you don’t have to memorize the various tasks, in the Quick Launch box, type @tasks and type some letter to see tasks containing those characters. Here’s a screen clipping showing the @tasks in action looking for the ones starting with env.

clip_image001

Once you type the @ symbol in the Quick Launch, you’ll see you’ve got other items like @menu, @opt, and so on that can jump you to the right place in the IDE quickly. I guess that’s why they called it Quick Launch. For completeness, here’s the list of all the Quick Tasks added by the Productivity Power Tools because it’s a good thing for you read and makes it easy for me to search for again.

Option

Description

CollapseRegions

Collapses  all #region tags in the current document

ExpandRegion

Expands  all #region tags in the current document

TxtFont-

Decreases  the text editor’s font size by 2 (min 6)

TxtFont0

Resets  the text editor’s font size to the default 10

TxtFont+

Increases  the text editor’s font size by 2 (max 60)

TxtFontReset 

Resets  all text editor font settings to their default values (based on current  theme)

EnvFont-

Decreases  the environment’s font size by 2 (min 5)

EnvFont0

Resets  the environment’s font size to the default 9

EnvFont+

Increases  the environment’s font size by 2 (max 59)

EnvFontReset

Resets  all environment font settings to their default values (based on current  theme)

InsTabsOff

Inserts  spaces instead of a tab whenever a tab is inserted (all languages)

InsTabsOn  

Keeps  the tab that is inserted instead of inserting spaces (all languages)

LineNumOff

Turns  off line numbers in the text editor (all languages)

LineNumOn 

Turns  on line numbers in the text editor (all languages)

PresentOff 

Turns  off presenter mode and returns the environment and text editor fonts to their  pre-presentation values

PresentOn

Turns  on presenter mode which increases environment and text editor font sizes, and  sets them to certain font families, so that VS is easier to see and read on a  projector

PresentEdit

Allows you to customize the Font family and Font size used by the PresentOn extension

ResetToBasic

Resets  VS to Visual Basic development settings

ResetToC++

Resets  VS to Visual C++ development settings

ResetToC#

Resets  VS to Visual C# development settings

ResetToF#

Resets  VS to Visual F# development settings

ResetToGeneral 

Resets  VS to General development settings

ResetToJavaScript

Resets  VS to JavaScript for Windows 8 Apps development settings

ResetToLightSwitch

Resets  VS to LightSwitch development settings

ResetToSQL

Resets  VS to SQL Server development settings

ResetToWeb

Resets  VS to Web development settings

ResetToWebCode

Resets  VS to Web (Code Only) development settings

SwitchCode

Switches  between designer/code behind or header/source files, opening the file if Necessary

TabSize-

Decreases  the tab and indent size by 2 (all languages)

TabSize0

Resets  the tab and indent size to the default 4 (all languages)

TabSize+

Increases  the tab and indent size by 2 (all languages)

WordWrapOff

Turns  off the text editor’s word wrap (all languages)

WordWrapOn  

Turns  on the text editor’s word wrap (all languages)

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