Visual Studio 2013: Making IntelliSense Transparent While You Code

As I mentioned before, I will be revisiting tips from older versions in this new series. I’m also removing the word “Preview” from these entries since is it safe to assume these features will continue to be in shipping versions of the product. I reserve the word “Preview” for those things that are new and could potentially change. This is definitely one of my top tips for folks and one that usually include in my talks on Visual Studio. Even though this feature has been around for a long time there are still many people who have never seen it. So let’s take a look.

 

IntelliSense In The Way

There are times when we are writing code and IntelliSense comes up:

 

Usually this is a good thing but sometimes it covers up code you need to see underneath.

 

 

IntelliSense Out Of The Way

If you want to temporarily get IntelliSense out of the way just press and hold the CTRL key on your keyboard:

 

This will make IntelliSense transparent so you can see the code underneath.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2013
  Never knew about that one! Nice! Sure beats doing <esc><take a look><hit ctrl+space> over and over again..

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2013
  Hey Marcus :) Yeah this one continues to be my all-time favorite tip. Z

• Anonymous
  July 08, 2013
  My VS2010 and VS2012 already do this. It must be something added by ReSharper, if this is supposed to be new in VS2013.

• Anonymous
  July 08, 2013
  "Even though this feature has been around for a long time there are still many people who have never seen it."