Making MonoDevelop for Mac (or Xamarin Studio) more like Visual Studio

If I were only living in the land of MonoDevelop, I probably wouldn’t care. I stil spend a large amount of time using Visual Studio, though, and switching contexts becomes very difficult when the IDEs are so different. While I haven’t gone as far as to swap the command and alt keys to match keyboard behavior on Windows, I do try to unite things as much as possible. If you are simply looking for a list of the default MonoDevelop keyboard shortcuts to learn, check out something more like this post from Dan Quirk. [Note: Most of these things apply to Xamarin Studio as well.] Text editing Word break mode This made the biggest difference in my tolerance for MonoDevelop. The default word break mode tends to ignore whitespace, making it behave completely differently moving the cursor forward versus backward in text. Preferences->Text Editor->Behavior; Navigation->Word break mode; set to SharpDevelop. This will bring your option+left/right and option+backspace/delete calls to be more in line with the ctrl versions under Visual Studio. The emacs version looks like it would work, but I opted for SharpDevelop. Key bindings ctrl+Space Bring up contextual menu for Intellisense (Edit.CompleteWord in VS, “Show Completion Window” in MD)…. Continue reading