Overview

VSMouseBindings is a simple Visual Studio Power toy that allows you to use all of those mouse buttons you have on your mouse. Using this power toy you can assign commands to each of the buttons on your five button mouse. This process is very similar to the process of assigning new keyboard shortcuts.

Almost everything in Visual Studio is accessible through a command. Commands are used from the menus, toolbars, command window, or keystrokes… and using this power toy they can also be used by the mouse.

Here is a look at the VSMouseBindings powertoy, as you can see you can assign commands to both the left and right click as well as the explorer forward and backward and the “middle-click” (pushing down the scroll wheel)

My favorite setup is to assign the View.NavigateBackward command to the left back button and the View.NavigateForward command to the forward button on the mouse. I then also like to assign the Solution.Build command to the middle click.
Download

Overview

Do you like the Command Window? Do you like the Command Prompt? Then there is a powertoy just for you. The VSCmdShell powertoy combines the command window and the command prompt and makes them available in a single window.

After downloading and installing the powertoy you may have to enable it in the Add-in Manager. (For some reason it may appear as “System Window 2”.)

Following is a look at the powertoy in action:

As you can see you now have access to the command prompt directly inside of Visual Studio, just about anything you can do in the command prompt you can now do right inside of the IDE. You can also execute Visual Studio commands in the same window by simply prefacing that command with an exclamation point, you will even get IntelliSense for the command list as shown here:

(Commands are an easy way to do something without reaching for the mouse, for a list of commands refer to Options -> Environment -> Keyboard)

Download