Daily Knowledge Drop
Visual Studio has the ability to pin documents which will ensure, by default, that the documents are always on the left side of the open documents tabs.
However it is also possible to pin the documents so they appear in their own separate row - where they are easier to find at a glance.
Default pinning
Below is a screen shot of what the default pinning looks like, with appsettings.json and appsettings.Test.json having been pinned:
The issue with this I find, is that at a glance its not easy to see which documents are actually pinned.
The icon indicating a document is pinned, the vertical pin shown by the red arrow and the horizontal pin icon indicating the active, unpinned document, shown by the green arrow are very similar at a glace. This similarity is even more prevalent at higher resolutions.
Tabs and Windows options
There is an option in Visual Studio to Show pinned tabs on separate row. This can be found by going to Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Tabs and Windows -> Show pinned tabs in separate row.
Separate row pinning
With the separate row option enabled, the pinned documents now (as described), are shown on their own separate row:
At a glace, much easier to see which documents are pinned and which are not.
Notes
A very small tweak to the default Visual Studio settings, but I find this can have a minor positive impact on developer experience when working with pinned documents.
A worthwhile improvement to this feature, would be the ability to drag a document from the unpinned row to the pinned row to automatically pin it, and visa-versa.
References
Hidden Features Of Visual Studio That Developer Should Know
Daily Drop 61: 27-04-2022
At the start of 2022 I set myself the goal of learning one new coding related piece of knowledge a day.
It could be anything - some.NET / C# functionality I wasn't aware of, a design practice, a cool new coding technique, or just something I find interesting. It could be something I knew at one point but had forgotten, or something completely new, which I may or may never actually use.
The Daily Drop is a record of these pieces of knowledge - writing about and summarizing them helps re-enforce the information for myself, as well as potentially helps others learn something new as well.