[city41]

I'm no longer a .NET developer. But I was for about a decade and I got to the point that I removed all toolbars from Visual Studio. I had nothing but the text editor and solution explorer (docked and only opened when needed). I'm surprised to read many comments here where people talk about finding icons and getting lost in the toolbars. Power uses of tools like Vim, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc use the keyboard for everything, I'd have thought most VS power users do that too.

[steverb]

I think most VS power users do that as well. I honestly can't remember the last time I clicked an icon on the toolbar.

One of the really nice things about pair programming is the number of times I've started hunting through a menu for an option and the other dev will say "Oh, just hit <chord>".

If you spend a great deal of time in ANY application you owe it to yourself to take one day a month and force yourself to use it without ever clicking a menu or icon. You'll be delighted at how much more productive you'll be.

[contextfree]

You can easily toggle "no chrome mode" with Shift-Alt-Enter, btw.

[city41]

I no longer have VS available to check. Is that "no chrome mode" or really just "fullscreen" mode? I seem to remember this mode made alt-tabbing to other apps problematic for some reason. Maybe I'm wrong. I also never maximize my windows, which I believe is another reason I didn't like this mode.

[contextfree]

You're right, it's fullscreen, I actually didn't entirely realize this. (I was sort of thinking of OneNote which has its own "full window for content" toggle which isn't fullscreen)

Windows in VS10 behave oddly in general around alt-tab and other things, I haven't managed to form a mental model of how/why they do.