Friday, September 30, 2022

Visual Studio: Disable Map Mode

In the blog post, Visual Studio Code: Disabling the Minimap, it was demonstrated how to disable the minimap feature in Visual; Studio Code. Minimap consumes screen real estate that could be used for viewing code. Microsoft chose to add the minimap feature to Visual Studio (starting with Visual Studio 2019) and called it Map Mode. This post demonstrates how to disable Map Mode in Visual Studio.

Below is an example of the traditional, Visual Studio, vertical scrollbar being replaced with a Map Mode vertical scrollbar:



To disable Map Mode, open Visual Studio and navigate to: 
    Tools | Options | Text Editor | All Languages | Scroll Bars

Navigating as described above will display the following:


Note above that the radio button, "Use map mode for vertical scroll bar" is selected, and "Use bar mode for vertical scroll bar" is not selected. To disable Map Mode, simply select "Use bar mode for vertical scroll bar" (see below) which deselects "Use map mode for vertical scroll bar":


Click on Ok in the previous dialog to finalize the disabling of Map Mode in Visual Studio.

Once Map Mode is disabled, the standard coding windows in Visual Studio appear as follows with a traditional scroll bar:


Microsoft's Justification for Map Mode

Microsoft's Visual Studio documentation, How to: Customize the scroll bar, includes a justification for the use of Map Mode. The following snippet is part of the aforementioned documentation and demonstrates a use of Map Mode namely how to identify find and replace locations throughout an entire source file:


Eight percent of males are color blind (1 in 12) and Microsoft has added a useful feature, Map Mode, the relies on the colors red and green. Map Mode reduces the amount of code visible in Visual Studio and is biased against a large number of developers with a rather well-documented disability.

The other blog posts that are addressed being color blind include:
I would much rather spend time developing code than working around "features" that demonstrate a bias against those who are color blind.


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