PhatStudio - free Visual Studio add-in for fast file navigation
About PhatStudio
PhatStudio is a free add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio (VS2005, VS2008, VS2010 and VS2012 are supported) that lets you quickly navigate files in large projects with just a few keystrokes. It lets you navigate files either by the Open File dialog (bound to Alt+O by default), or the PhatStudio Explorer tool window. Type in multiple terms separated by spaces to match on all terms.
It also includes a header flip/switch to related file feature, bound to Alt+S by default. Header flip will switch between
a .cpp file and corresponding .h/.hpp file. It will also switch between other related file types, such as aspx/aspx.cs and ascx/ascx.cs.
PhatStudio is an open source product distributed under GPLv3. It's written in C# and full source code is available on our SourceForge
website.
Open File dialog:
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PhatStudio Explorer tool window:
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PhatStudio feedback
To leave feedback and suggestions or get help: please visit our
forum.
Why PhatStudio?
We made PhatStudio because there was no free Visual Studio add-in that did fast file navigation by substring match that we could find that we wanted to use
on a daily basis. This feature is fairly crucial if you work in projects with lots (hundreds or thousands) of files.
Some similar add-ins that we tried before we decided to write PhatStudio:
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Visual Assist X from Whole Tomato Software. This is a great product that does a great job of fast file navigation
(among other things), but it's commercial, and pricey.
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SonicFileFinder from Jens Schaller. A very cool, and free (but not open source) add-in
to do fast file navigation. For us, though, it was a little too laggy in large projects.
- Flat Solution Explorer from
James Finnegan. A cool, free and open source add-in that is pretty snappy and responsive.
A few things kept it from being the add-in we wanted, though: it doesn't (as of
this writing) work in Visual Studio 2008. It only has a tool window (always open)
implementation, no modal dialog. And it only matches from the beginning of a file
name, not any substring match.
A big shout out to the authors of the above products, but we decided to write our
own add-in to get the responsiveness and feature set we wanted for something we
were going to use every day in large projects. So PhatStudio was born.
Our SourceForge project website is at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phatstudio/.
Other tools from the same team
BlinkSync, a fast, lightweight and
free line file and directory synchronization tool
