DevExpress CodeRush Tips&Tricks

Markers are navigation placeholders that remember important locations inside your source code you’ll need to move to in the future. In most cases, they look like little triangular glyphs in the IDE’s code editor:

Markers are stack-based. When you collect a marker, it pops off the stack. You can jump back at any time to the top marker on the stack by pressing Esc key (or Alt+End).

Markers can be of the following types:

• Hard Marker (red triangle) – is dropped manually onto the current caret position using the default Alt+Home key. They will remain until collected, regardless of any activity on the line they sit on. Currently, manual dropping and manipulating of markers is only available in CodeRush Pro. But there’s a work-around for other products if you wish to apply this feature.

• Soft Marker (blue triangle) – is dropped automatically by CodeRush and/or Refactor! (e.g. through a template expansion, selection embedding, or whenever you apply a refactoring or code provider that takes you away from the original location, etc). This kind of marker will dissolve and vanish from the stack if the line on which they are resident is altered in any way.

• Selection Marker (color brackets) – is dropped manually onto the current selection. It completely restores the selection you had before, once you collect it.

Invisible Marker – is dropped onto the current position when you use navigation features such as Tab to Next Reference or Quick Navigation. This marker is not displayed in the code editor, and is used to restore your original location before you started using the navigation features.

Markers provide the following features:

Collect Marker

When marker is collected, a circle (like the image above) appears, and starts narrowing until it finally hides. The animation is intended to catch your attention, so you see what happened, instead of looking around the screen where your caret ended up.

Collect Marker and Paste

If the clipboard contains code that you want to paste at a recently-dropped marker, you can jump back to the marker and paste in a single action by pressing Shift+Esc.

Swapping markers

You can even use markers to work in two places at once (alternating between two important locations with a single keystroke), and you can also use them as visual reminders of unfinished code. Often when creating new code, you want to reference another section of code while you work. Usually when this happens, the location where you want to build the new code is far from the source. Markers can solve this problem elegantly. Here’s how:

1. Press Alt+Home to drop a marker at the first location where you want to be. Copy anything to the clipboard from this location, if needed.
2. Navigate to the secondary location.
3. Do what you need at the secondary location until you need to return to the original location.
4. Press Shift+Alt+Home to execute the Swap Marker feature. This will exchange the caret with the topmost marker on the stack, replacing the topmost marker with a new one (positioned at the caret location where you just pressed Shift+Alt+Home).
5. Now, do what you need at the original location (e.g. copy something to the clipboard).
6. When you’re ready to return to secondary location, press Shift+Alt+Home again.
7. Repeat steps 3-6 as often as you like, to get the work done.

This is an area where the dynamic nature of markers really excels over static bookmarks. All you need to do is drop a marker at the primary location and press Shift+Alt+Home from the secondary location. As you work down through each respective section of code, the markers move with you, always dropping at the point where you stopped working.

Markers – Comparison with Visual Studio Bookmarks

If you are already proficient with Visual Studio bookmarks, you might be wondering if CodeRush markers offer any compelling benefits over bookmarks. Indeed, markers offer a number of improvements over the basic bookmarks included with Visual Studio. Here’s a quick overview of the differences between markers and Visual Studio bookmarks.

Feature	Markers	Visual Studio Bookmarks
Marks a line for later visitation		(VS bookmarks are drawn in the widget column, and are prone to being obscured by breakpoints and other widgets)
Remembers column position		(the caret is always positioned at first column)
Remembers view position		(bookmark is always centered)
Stack-based, allowing tracing of steps		(bookmarks are navigated in line number order)
Move quickly between two locations		(only if the two locations are both in the active file (and there are only two bookmarks in that file)

Similar Posts:

• DXCore Services – Markers
• CodeRush Xpress navigation features
• CodeRush Pro navigation features
• CodeRush and Visual Studio bookmarks
• Shared Source – Drop Marker Before Jump