There’s a little feature of Visual Studio (Windows and macOS) that I stumbled upon years ago, that seems to shock a lot of developers I still meet today. It’s incredibly simple and not super exciting, but it might save you a small amount of time a lot of the time so I thought I’d take the time to share it for those who aren’t aware.

If you hold down the alt key, and then drag your mouse cursor, it allows you to select text in a very different way:

Whilst randomly making shapes isn’t very useful, what is very useful, is being able to select columns and perform bulk updates on code, such as:


You can even generate new code, that initially will look terrible, but with a quick format document, you’re good to go:


So there you go, if this isn’t something you were aware already, of I hope this proves useful for your development in the future.