The Morning Brew is a great news source for developers for many years now. In its most recent post it mentioned an extension for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 called IntelliCommand that implements something that I had wanted for quite some time: Some kind of dynamic help for hotkeys.

IntelliCommand shows a popup

• when you press and hold Ctrl, Shift or Alt (or combinations thereof) for a configurable amount of time, or
• after you press the first key combination of a chord shortcut key (e.g. Ctrl-E) and wait for an (independently configurable) amount of time.

In the following screenshot I pressed and released Ctrl-E, and after a short delay the popup appeared:

The extension is available in the Visual Studio Gallery, so finding, downloading and installing it via the Extension Manager is extremely simple:

The default delays (2000 / 1600 milliseconds) are a bit long for my liking, but this can be changed in Tools – Options:

So far things are working great on my machine. Some known issues do seem to exist, though (e.g. that the extension doesn’t work on non-EN versions of Visual Studio). See the author’s comments in the announcement blog post and in the Visual Studio Gallery for more information.