Syntactic Line Compression in Visual Studio
26 May 2014The Productivity Power Tools (PPT) extensions have never held much interest for me. I found that while much of it looks useful and interesting, I would quickly forget it was there and stop using it. Unlike ReSharper, PPT doesn’t nudge me into using it.
However, when PPT recently announced a new feature called, “Syntactic Line Compression”, I had to have a look.
Syntactic line compression enables you to make better use of your screen’s vertical real-estate. It shrinks lines that contain neither letters nor numbers by 25% vertically, allowing more lines to be displayed in the editor. Other lines are not affected.
Syntactic Line Compression is a set and forget feature. It squeezes more lines onto the screen and does so in a way that does not distract, annoy or slow-down the IDE. I thought the different sized lines might be visually disruptive. To my surprise the changes were only subtly noticeable.
A small but welcome improvement.