How can I switch to a different tab group using the keyboard in visual studio 2013

Question

Consider the following window setup:

Currently there are two tab groups open. The left tab group is active (with the ListingDetailsDTO.cs window active).

I would now like to switch to the right tab group, so visual studio will appear like this:

This is easily possible using the mouse (ie just left click the right window). However I cannot figure out how to do it with the keyboard alone. Assigning a shortcut to Window -> Move to next tab group came closest, but it also moves the current window to the next tab group, which isn't what I wanted. I thought Window.NextPane, or Window.NextSubpane might work, but they didn't.

Is there a way to do what I want? I am happy to install (preferably) free extensions to make this possible if necessary.

Answer 1

For Visual Studio 2017/2019, I created an open-source extension to do this:

It by default adds two keyboard shortcuts:

• Tools.NavigateTabGroups.Next (CTRL+SHIFT+Right) to move to the next tab group
• Tools.NavigateTabGroups.Previous (CTRL+SHIFT+Left) to move to the previous group

There are six commands altogether (all of which can be assigned shortcuts):

Answer 2

This is possible using the VSStreamliner extension. Only caveat is that the lastet version I know of is for VS2010. Fortunately, there's a hack-around -- I have gotten it to work with VS2015.

1. Download VSStreamliner.

2. Edit the extension's version to match your version of Visual Studio, as described here.

3. Install the version-hacked extension. This provides commands Window.NextDocumentUp, Window.NextDocumentDown, Window.NextDocumentLeft and Window.NextDocumentRight.

4. In VS, go to Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Keyboard, and set your desired keybindings to those commands. [Emacs users: For some reason "C-x o" didn't work. (Maybe VS doesn't like two-stroke bindings?), so I used "M-o" and "M-p" for NextDocumentDown and NextDocumentUp respectively.]