Multiple windows in Visual Studio

I've just come to Visual Studio 2008 from a UNIX / Java background.

In Visual Studio, how can I have multiple overlapping editor windows? In Eclipse, I can open a new Window, add an editor to each of them, then Alt-Tab between them, overlap them, select them in the Taskbar, etc. Similarly, I'd like to put 'Output' in it's own 'first class' window so I can easily Alt-Tab between that and an editor when on a laptop.

Studio tools lets me 'tear off' and editor window, but the 'torn off' window doesn't respect Alt-Tab rules, and always hides the main Visual Studio pane.

Update: By way of example, In 'Word' I can have two documents open. I can Alt-Tab between them. I can Alt-T开发者_运维百科ab between either document, or Alt-Tab from either one to Outlook if I wish. I can overlap the documents, or place them side-by-side. I can place one document on one monitor, and one document on the other. I can have have Outlook open on one screen, overlapping one of the Word documents, while I edit the other. This is the kind of thing I would like to do with my source files!

You can change the window layout in the Tools menu under Options. The very first item is Environment\General. You can choose Multiple Documents (versus Tabbed Documents). That may give you the "look" you are describing.

However, I don't think it is possible to use alt+tab to change windows since those windows still belong to the single instance of VS2008. You can change windows with ctrl+F6. In addition, a nice trick when using Tabbed Documents is to press ctrl+alt+down arrow. That brings up a list of all open editor windows.

Alt+Tab is for switching between applications on Windows.

To switch between windows within Visual Studio use Ctrl+Tab.

This should work on any mutli-windowed application.

You can click on the tab of the window and drag outside making it a standalone window.

If you are a vim user, and install VsVim, you have an effective work around for dealing the quirky behaviour Visual studio has for moving between file editing windows.

You can easily make vertical and horizontal split windows within the "main" file editing window, just as you would in vim, using the regular vim keys. e.g. with any of the regular vim commands :vs, <C-w>s, <C-w>v, ...

If you tear off a second editing window (e.g. with the mouse) and put it on a separate monitor, you can use Vim's global marks, or <C-w>w (and similar commands for navigating between panes in vim) to jump between file editing windows across different monitors/screens with just a few keys.