CodeRush is one of the greatest tools I’ve ever used in Visual Studio.  Quick navigation, code templates, re-factoring, all kinds of goodies to help make working with code easier.  Even though CodeRush has some  great features, it’s two main drawbacks are not everyone uses it and it only works within Visual Studio.

Tonight I felt a little like Scotty in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:

[faced with a 20th century computer] Scotty: Computer. Computer? [Bones hands him a mouse and he speaks into it] Scotty: Hello, computer. Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard. Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.

So tonight, I’m just happily writing an email when I realize that I want to select a bunch of lines to move them.  So, what do I do?  I start hitting the ‘+’ key on the numpad.  In CodeRush, this will start selecting text, increasing the selection scope with each press of the ‘+’.  I finally stopped after 3  or 4 presses when it finally dawned on me that all I was doing was typing ‘+’.

“Oh,”  I thought to myself, “this isn’t Visual Studio.”

How quaint.