Is there any way to make Visual Studio stop indenting namespaces?

Question

Visual Studio keeps trying to indent the code inside namespaces.

For example:

namespace Foo {    void Bar();     void Bar()    {     }  } 

Now, if I un-indent it manually then it stays that way. But unfortunately if I add something right before void Bar(); - such as a comment - VS will keep trying to indent it.

This is so annoying that basically because of this only reason I almost never use namespaces in C++. I can't understand why it tries to indent them (what's the point in indenting 1 or even 5 tabs the whole file?), or how to make it stop.

Is there a way to stop this behavior? A config option, an add-in, a registry setting, hell even a hack that modifies devenv.exe directly.

Answer 1

As KindDragon points out, Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 has an option to stop indenting.

You can uncheck TOOLS -> Options -> Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Formatting -> Indentation -> Indent namespace contents.

Answer 2

Just don't insert anything before the first line of code. You could try the following approach to insert a null line of code (it seems to work in VS2005):

namespace foo {; // !<--- void Test(); } 

This seems to suppress the indentation, but compilers may issue warnings and code reviewers/maintainers may be surprised! (And quite rightly, in the usual case!)