Middle Click Close in Visual Studio

A long time ago I added middle-click to close tabs in PN - a popular choice. At the time I moaned about this not being supported in Visual Studio. When the VS 2005 development betas were out, myself and many others requested this feature.

Microsoft’s response was that this was not a standard windows UI feature and therefore they would not be implementing it. Leaving aside the fact that Visual Studio often invents UI features of its own and also that IE 7 supports middle-click closing for tabs, this was a really poor response from Microsoft given that it would have been so easy to add this feature and make people happy!

Fortunately for all us Visual Studio users, Jonathan Payne wrote VSTabs, a sort of mini WndTabs for VS 2003 and 2005. This gives you tabs that group paired files (like .cpp and .h) and also gives you middle-click close - wahey! Finally, the source is available so you can tweak to get them working as you like.

Current downsides are that the add-in breaks the right-click context menu, and doesn’t show the modified status of the file (no * for modified files). Oh, and some that I work with hate the colours - who’d have thought?! This should all be relatively easy to fix though.