Like most developers, I'm a huge fan of the scroll wheel.  It's a major part of my daily computing experience, so much so that I find I lose major productivity if I'm relegated to using just the scrollpad on my laptop. 

Now I've been using Windows for a while now.  But I was amazed to learn something brand new today.  Somebody posted a tip that you could simply "middle click" with the scroll wheel on a tab in Visual Studio to close out that document.   So I fired up VS to test it out and sure enough, it works. 

That made me wonder ... is this a Visual Studio trick, or does it apply to any application with tabs?  I fired up Firefox, IE, and Notepad++ and it works on all of them, too.

I showed this little trick to a coworker who was also surprised to learn about it.  He said, "I knew you could open new tabs by middle-clicking with the scroll wheel, but I didn't know you could close them, too."  Huh???  "Sure.  If you middle-click on a link in Firefox or IE, it will automatically open the link in a new tab."

There you go - two tips for the price of none.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008 2:10:38 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Tips | Windows