Azure DevOps Hidden Gems #7 – Keyboard Shortcuts
I've been working with what we now call Azure DevOps for many years and I'm constantly amazed by features I never knew existed or which I vaguely knew existed but hadn't fully appreciated. In this blog post series I'm attempting to shine a light on some of these hidden gems for the benefit of others. The full list of posts is here and if you have any suggestions for other posts please leave a comment!
Until recently if you'd asked me if Azure DevOps supported keyboard shortcuts I'd have guessed at yes because, well, it's a Microsoft product and that's what they would do, however I'd have had to perform a web search to get any more details. So imagine my surprise and delight when I stumbled on the Keyboard shortcuts for Azure DevOps and Team Explorer page in the official documentation and realised that Azure DevOps is positively teeming with keyboard shortcuts!
My enthusiasm was initially tempered slightly by the last updated date of the page (January 2017 as I write, making me feel that the page hadn't received any love for a while, however it's an oversight as the page has been updated with Azure DevOps references) but also due to the fact that some of the shortcuts don't seem to work. In particular, the shortcuts at the organisation level didn't work for me. Perhaps this is because the UI is in a state of flux and the shortcuts haven't caught up—who knows?
However, once you have drilled-in to a project then shortcuts (or most of them) certainly do work and can really speed up your navigation both between the different core areas of Azure DevOps and also within an area. In particular I love the Global g-series shortcuts for moving between core areas:
These g-series shortcuts can really make you zip around Azure DevOps like you had written the UI yourself! Within each area of Azure DevOps there are more shortcuts for that area, for example these are the ones for the Repos area:
Of course the problem with shortcuts is remembering them. If you are working with Azure DevOps on a reasonably regular basis as I am then the -g-series are definitely worth memorising. If you spend a lot of time in one of the specific areas then it may well pay off to master the shortcuts for that area as well.
Hope this helps!
Cheers -- Graham
