VisualStudio: Shortcut for when Renaming Variable

Question

In Visual Studio, when you rename a variable name in its definition, there's a little underline in the last letter so if you hover that, you'll get the option "Rename OldVaribleName to NewVariableName" and so rename all entries in that procedure of that variable.

Is there a shortcut for that and not use the mouse?

Answer 1

These are known as Smart Tags.

You can use CTRL+.

Shift+Alt+F10 is another option.

Answer 2

By way of an updated answer...

Update for Visual Studio 2022

Same behavior as 2019.

Update for Visual Studio 2019

Same behavior as 2017.

Update for Visual Studio 2017

In Visual Studio 2017 click the variable and then press Ctrl + r, r. This works without an issue (see comments below about differences in Visual Studio 2015 where the whole command had to be repeated).

Visual Studio 2015

In Visual Studio 2015, if you click on the variable and use Ctrl + r, Ctrl + r it will lock onto the variable name and highlight all instances of the variable. Then as you begin typing the new variable name it will rename all instances at once. Hit enter to escape, once you are finished (note: differences might exist between update versions. See comments below).

Edit: One warning on this approach. If you are using Razor in your views, it will not necessarily rename those variables. I haven't done an empirical experiment to see if there are certain cases where it does or does not pick those up, but I have definitely had several cases where it renamed the more strongly typed variables in the server-side code (DAL and Controllers) but not the views.