Some things I'm missing from Visual Studio that for example QtCreator has natively:
- Smart indention (copy/paste a piece of code into a scope with different indention and it automatically adds or remove tabs for you, rather then manually select all lines and press tab several times).
- Pointer recognition (press . after a variable that is a pointer and it is replaced with -> automatically).
- Automatic closing quotes/brackets for literals/function calls/scopes/includes.
- Hotswap between cpp/header (VS only has this for cpp>header using context menu).
- Hotswap between declaration/implementation (VS only has separate go to definition/declaration that is still slow and buggy with large projects).
- Syntax highlighting is still limited in VS without plugins, although it's catching up with 2012.

Basically, when it comes to writing code, I find using plain old Visual Studio without third party plugins bad for your productivity.

None of those things would be particularly hard to implement (on top of the intellisense engine they already have, anyway). I think the only reason Microsoft hasn't added them is because they would put Visual Assist X (which includes all of your bullet points) out of business.

Some things I'm missing from Visual Studio that for example QtCreator has natively:
- Smart indention (copy/paste a piece of code into a scope with different indention and it automatically adds or remove tabs for you, rather then manually select all lines and press tab several times).
- Pointer recognition (press . after a variable that is a pointer and it is replaced with -> automatically).
- Automatic closing quotes/brackets for literals/function calls/scopes/includes.
- Hotswap between cpp/header (VS only has this for cpp>header using context menu).
- Hotswap between declaration/implementation (VS only has separate go to definition/declaration that is still slow and buggy with large projects).
- Syntax highlighting is still limited in VS without plugins, although it's catching up with 2012.

Basically, when it comes to writing code, I find using plain old Visual Studio without third party plugins bad for your productivity.

None of those things would be particularly hard to implement. I think the only reason Microsoft hasn't added them is because they would put Visual Assist X (which includes all of your bullet points) out of business.