How to show / unhide Web Essential bar from chrome?

Question

I've checked autohide and the bar disappeared but now how can I see it again?

Answer 1

To see the Web Essentials menu in Chrome when using Visual Studio 2015:

• Ensure you've installed Web Essentials 2015 - https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ee6e6d8c-c837-41fb-886a-6b50ae2d06a2

• Click the 'View in Browser' button in Visual Studio to view your site:

  

• The Web Essentials menu will appear as an overlay at the bottom of your web page

• Press CTRL in Chrome to toggle the Web Essentials menu on or off

Answer 2

It's enough to press CTRL from inside Chrome.

Answer 3

CTRL works inside of Internet explorer as well.

Answer 4

Note that you have to have BrowserLink enabled. Otherwise Ctrl doesn't do anything.

Answer 5

Note, this feature is no longer available in Visual Studio 2017 update 3 as the author, madskristensen states:

It was removed for several reasons.

1. It interfered too much with the DOM of the running page
2. It didn't work when the various features were split out into their own extension
3. I build this Chrome extension to replace it

Link to image of evidence is below.(Not enough rep to show image on post)

Author of web essentials explaining why the tool bar is not suitable for the browser

Link to issue on github

Answer 6

There is a WebEssentials2015-Settings.json file which contains default settings for web essentials (e.g. for VS2015 it is \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\WebEssentials2015-Settings.json). After I clicked autohide the only way for me to bring the web essentials menu back in the browsers was to edit this file setting the ShowMenu to true ("ShowMenu": true). That fixed the issue for me.

One note though, this file seems to be read on VS startup so you may need to restart VS to see the difference. Also these settings can be separately set for each solution (Web Essentials > Create solution settings). This option creates the .json file specific for given solution.