Road to MonoDevelop 2.4: Navigation

by Miguel de Icaza

Perhaps my favorite feature in MonoDevelop 2.4 is the "Navigate To" functionality that we added. This new feature is hooked to Control-comma on Linux and Windows and to Command-. on Mac.

This feature lets you quickly jump to a file, a class or a method:

I used to navigate between my files by opening then from the solution explorer, and then using Control-tab or the tabs. Needless to say, the old way just felt too clumsy for a fast typist like me.

With Navigate-To, I can just hit the hotkey and then like I would in Emacs, type the filename, type or method and jump directly to the method. This is fabulous.

This will also search substrings, so you can either start typing the name of a method or you can fully qualify the method (for example: "Vector.ToString").

But it gets better, you can use abbreviations, so instead of typing "DialogViewController" you can just type "dvc":

BREAKING UPDATE Michael just told me of a cute extra feature: if your match is for a filename, if you type ":NUMBER" it will jump to the selected file to the specified line number.

The result:

Posted on 14 Jun 2010