I've heard of RockScroll from Scott Hanselman a while ago in his blog entry. The Visual Studio plug-in basically replaces the vertical scroll bar with a real time thumbnail of the code. Plus it highlights words if you double-click them. It's niiiiceee!! I've soon downloaded it and used since then (more than a year).

However lacking the ease of using the window split, having parasyte double click highlightings and desynchronizing when you collapse a region of code annoyed me for a while...

Until today!!

Scott did it again and twitted about a good replacement for RockScroll : MetalScroll.

It does all RockScroll does plus :

  • double-clicking the scrollbar brings up an options dialog where the color scheme and scrollbar width can be altered.
  • the widget at the top of the scrollbar which splits the editor into two panes is still usable when the add-in is active.
  • you must hold down ALT when double-clicking a word to highlight all its occurrences in the file. RockScroll highlights words on regular double-click, which can be annoying when you actually meant to use drag&drop text editing, for example when dragging a variable to the watches window.
  • pressing ESC clears the highlight markers.
  • lines containing highlighted words are marked with 5x5 pixel blocks on the right edge of the scrollbar, to make them easier to find (similar to breakpoints and bookmarks).
  • multiline comments are recognized.
  • hidden text regions are supported.
  • it works in split windows.
  • it's open source, so people who want to change stuff or add features can do so themselves.

    • Here's how it looks in my VS :

     

     Later edit : This also comes as a patriotic thing for me as the author is a fellow romanian like me, Mihnea Balta :)