CTRL-TAB

I'm sure that pretty much everyone knows you can press ALT-TAB to move between open applications in Windows. I have often found myself trying to use ALT-TAB to move between open tabs or windows within applications such as Visual Studio and Visual FoxPro.

Some time ago, I was watching a video by Beth Massi on VB.NET's refactoring tools. In the video, I noticed that they were using CTRL-TAB to move between open tabs in Visual Studio. I didn't realize you could do that and thought it was pretty cool. When you do, you get a dialog like the one below and as you continue to press TAB the selection moves down the "Active Files" list until you let go of the CTRL key, just like ALT-TAB. This has already saved me a great deal of time and aggravation.

Not surprisingly, this also works in SQL Server Management Studio.

Just today, I decided to try CTRL-TAB in VFP. Guess what, it works! It doesn't bring up any sort of dialog but it does cycle through all the open windows. I'm sure all you veterans already knew this, but I just discovered it for the first time and I'm really happy to know it is there.