Editor Guidelines

A Visual Studio extension that adds vertical column guides to the text editor.

The extension adds vertical column guides behind your code. This is useful if you are trying to tabulate columns of data or if you want to ensure that your lines don't extend beyond a certain length. You specify where the guides go and what color they should be.

Visual Studio 2022

Visual Studio 2015, 2017, 2019

Getting Started

You can either download the extension (VSIX) from the Visual Studio Marketplace and manually install it, or intall it from within Visual Studio itself.

Download from the Visual Studio Marketplace

There are two versions in the Visual Studio Marketplace

• Download for Visual Studio 2022
• Download for Visual Studio 2015, 2017, 2019

Once downloaded, double-click on the downloaded file (.VSIX) and follow the prompts to install it into Visual Studio.

Install from within Visual Studio

• Visual Studio 2019 and 2022: Select "Manage Extensions" on the "Extensions" menu. Search for "Editor Guidelines" in the Visual Studio Marketplace.
• Visual Studio 2015 and 2017: Select "Extensions and Updates..." from the "Tools" menu. Search for "Editor Guidelines" in the Visual Studio Marketplace.

You will then have to close and restart Visual Studio for the extension to be fully installed.

Usage

Control guidelines via the context (right-click) menu on the editor surface. You will see a Guidelines flyout with three commands:

• When Add Guideline is selected, a vertical dashed line will be drawn at the same position as the caret (insertion point).
• Remove Guideline will remove any guideline at the current insertion point.
• Remove All Guidelines does exactly that.

These commands may also be accessed from Visual Studio's Command Window.

Note that the column numbers used for the Edit.AddGuideline and Edit.RemoveGuideline commands refer to the right side of the given column of text. i.e. To place a guide to the right of column 80, use Edit.AddGuideline 80. To place a guide to the left of the first column use Edit.AddGuideline 0.

You can change the guideline color from the Fonts and Colors page in Tools|Options. Look for Guideline in the Text Editor category:

.editorconfig support (VS 2017 or above)

For VS 2017, VS 2019 and VS 2022, the position of guidelines can be overridden via settings in .editorconfig files. Set the guidelines property to a list of column values. The following example sets guidelines at columns 80 and 120 for C# and VB files and a single guideline at column 80 for all other files.

# All files
[*]
guidelines = 80

# C# or VB files
[*.{cs,vb}]
guidelines = 80, 120

You can set the guideline style like this:

[*]
# Named color format
guidelines_style = 1px dotted black

[*.{cs,vb}]
# ARGB color format (red with 25% opacity)
guidelines_style = 2.5px solid 40ff0000

As shown, you can have different styles for different file types. There are three different drawing styles:

• solid
• dotted
• dashed

As the examples show, colors may be named or in RGB or ARGB (hexadecimal) format. The available color names are from WPF's Colors collection (System.Windows.Media.Colors).

As the following example shows, you can set the style for each guideline separately. Three guidelines are defined. The first two define custom styles. The third, at column 132 doesn't specify a style, so it will be drawn using the default style which, if not specified via guidelines_style, will take its color from Fonts & Colors.

[*]
guidelines = 40 1px dotted black, 80 10px solid 30B0ED4C, 132

To learn more about .editorconfig see https://aka.ms/editorconfigdocs

Note: When guidelines are set via .editorconfig they override any other guidelines set via the context menus or command window.

Note: This extension collects and transmits anonymized usage statistics to the extension author for product improvement purposes.