It has always bugged me why would the Visual Studio IDE clear the clipboard when you press CTRL-C and no selection is made. Have you ever noticed that?

I was reading one of my favourite magazines yesterday (Code Magazine) and found this tip in the “Ask the Doc Detective” column.

Dear Doc Detective,

I cannot tell you how many times I day I accidentally hit Ctrl+C instead of Ctrl+V when trying to paste code in the editor. Why doesn’t this work like Word?

In Word, if you accidentally hit Ctrl+C when nothing is selected, nothing happens. It does not wipe out your clipboard contents, so you can still hit Ctrl+V and paste its contents.

I hunted around for the option to turn this off the other day, but did not find it. Is there a way that you can turn this behavior off, and if so, where?

-Fuming in Fullerton

Dear Fuming,

There is indeed a way to turn this behavior off, and I’m at a loss to explain why it’s on by default. Just go to Tools, Options, check the Show All Settings box, expand the Text Editor node and select All Languages. Under Settings, clear the Apply Cut or Copy commands when there is no selection option, and you’re good to go.

This is covered in the topic “How to: Set General Editor Options”, which is pretty hard to find if you don’t know that this option is a general editor setting.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder why this option even exists. Is there ever really a case where someone would want to cut or copy a blank line?

-Doc Detective

The full link to this tip is: http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=0902101

The official MSDN documentation about this tip is available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165328.aspx.