VS 2008 - ctrl-tab behavior

Question

As you may know, in VS 2008 ctrl+tab brings up a nifty navigator window with a thumbnail of each file. I love it, but there is one tiny thing that is annoying to me about this feature: the window stays around after releasing the ctrl key. When doing an alt+tab in windows, you can hit tab to get to the item you want (while still holding down the alt key), and then when you find what you want, lifting up on the alt key selects that item.

I wish VS 2008 would do the same. For me, when I lift off of ctrl, the window is still there. I have to hit enter to actually select the item. I find this annoying.

Does anyone know how to make VS 2008 dismiss the window on the release of the ctrl key?

Answer 1

You probably have the text-to-speech narrator enabled.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2467648&SiteID=1&mode=1

Just uncheck all checkboxes under "Text-To-Speech" narrator software.

--> To open Narrator using the keyboard, press CTRL+ESC, press R, type narrator, and then press Enter.

This one drove me crazy for several months until I found this posting.

Answer 2

I found this behaviour when I was running VS2008 under windows 7 and had been using the magnifier app.

I suspect it would similarly occur under vista.

Basically I had zoomed all the way back out but not shut down the magnifier app. Once it was shut down, things returned to normal.

Answer 3

This bloody thing is haunting me as well. Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Windows 7 64-bit. Setting the registry key mentioned in this thread won't help. Sara Ford brags that she knows the right key (http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2008/01/04/did-you-know-use-ctrl-tab-to-bring-up-the-ide-navigator-to-get-a-bird-s-eye-view-and-navigation-of-all-open-files-and-tool-windows-in-visual-studio.aspx) but she won't tell. I guess the marvelous tip is too large to fit on the margin of the page or something.

Also turning all the narrator options off or on doesn't help (but it does make me and my co-workers crazy.) As a bonus starting the narrator.exe (WIN-R narrator ENTER) starts up the windows magnifier (magnifier.exe) and it immediately zooms into molecule level without giving way to zoom back (ctrl +/-, win -/+, win-mouse wheel, esc doesn't work.) Have to kill it from task manager, which is bloody easy when each pixel is the size of a pick-up truck. Magnifier never starts up when you need it (supposed to start up with win-+), but it does occasionally go into mode where it starts up ON EACH BLOODY LOGIN, remote desktop or not. And zooms into atom scale with no way to get back. The later (week or so) it goes away. The control panel setting doesn't seem to help.

Also, I've had this sticky ctrl-tab issue at least twice to three times (right now I'm having it) and it has gone away after few weeks without clear reason why. I've just bit my teeth and gone on. But now I've had enough.

Microsoft: I won't blame you on adding accessability features for disabled people, but for god's sake don't in-your-face them at me all the fscking time. Fix the bloody thing, all I'll make sure you're seriously need accessability features the rest of your life.

Answer 4

I worked around this issue reassigning the ctrl-tab shortcut key to Window.NextDocumentWindow instead of Window.NextDocumentWindowNav (IDE Navigator). None of the above workarounds fixed the problem for VS 2010 on Win 7.

MS needs to fix this issue!

Answer 5

Strange. My VS2008SP1 install exhibits your desired behavior (in a web application project). I do not recall making any explicit changes.

Answer 6

When "Windows Speech Recognition" is running (even though not listening to commands), the VS2010 exhibits this behavior. Exiting "Windows Speech Recognition" restores the default i.e. the selection can be changed by pressing Tab key again and again while keeping the Ctrl key pressed and document is selected as soon as Ctrl key is released.

Answer 7

Just in case anyone still needed a fix for this (I've encountered this behavior in VS2010) what you can do is:

• Close VS
• Enable sticky keys
• Reopen VS
• Disable sticky keys

This solved it for me.

Answer 8

Check the "narrator" answer. I'm pretty sure it's to allow time for the narrator to read the choices... you can then "enter" the selection when you're sure of your choice.

Otherwise, check your 'sticky keys' settings (control panel\accessibility options\keyboard) and uncheck the options.

Answer 9

Just turning off the narrator didn't work for me.

What I did (besides unchecking the narrator stuff) was go to the Control panel's Ease of Access Center on each of the Explore All Settings screens, unchecked any options which were still checked, and then clicked Apply.

Once I did this, things went back to working.

Even if none of the checkboxes are checked on one of the explore all settings screen make sure to still click the Apply button, as it seems that just unchecking the narrator stuff does not always work - but clicking on the Apply button on the various sections will effectively reset and apply the settings.

Answer 10

I came across same issue with VS2012 today; It was all good -- releasing Ctrl key will activate the doc that had focus on that nifty pop up window.

My cause was 'Inspect' that I started using this morning. Apparently it holds the pop up window in order to give you more time to play around.

Simply kill 'Inspect', all back normal. I don't know the fix to have 'Inspect' running & normal behaviour at the same time.

Answer 11

Doesn't seem to happen to me. But I wasn't aware of that feature before, and I just tried it today. You might want to try installing Service Pack 1, as I also just installed that today, and the behaviour seems to have been fixed.

Answer 12

Maybe they changed it in SP1, but it works that way in mine. Holding down CTRL, tab cycles through the pages. When I let off of CTRL, it selects that page and disappears. I never tried it before SP1, so can't tell you if it's new behavior.

Answer 13

Sounds to me like your keyboard has a stuck key. Try to find out if Control is sticking by running osk.exe (Windows built-in On-screen keyboard) which will show you what keys are being pushed.