Here’s what my Visual Studio screen usually looks like when I’m coding in full screen mode:

Note that  I’ve cut the picture to reduce the height but there are a few things to notice:

• - No Scroll Bars
• - No Navigation Bars
• - No Tool Bars
• - No Tool Windows
• - No Menu

All the above take quite a bit of space and therefore reduce the amount of code you can see on screen. To work in distraction free mode, I therefore do the following.

Work in Full Screen

Go to View > Full Screen or use the SHIFT + ALT + ENTER shortcut.

Remove the Scroll Bars

Go to Tools > Options and uncheck both Vertical scroll bar and Horizontal scroll bar:

Remove the Navigation Bars

As I mainly navigate the code through R# shortcuts I find little use for them. To remove them go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > C# and uncheck Navigation bar.

Remove all Tool Bars

The easiest way to do that is to go to the View > Toolbars > Customize dialog and un-tick them all.

On the few occasions where I need one of them, I simply re-enable them through the menu.

Remove all Tool Windows

As you move back and forth through the code and Solution Explorer, the Watch windows, etc., you will end up having a busy screen fairly quickly again. You can either mouse click to close the tool windows, use SHIFT + ESC to close one of them, set them to auto-hide or use a macro to close them all in one go. The latter is my preferred option and for this I will refer you to my Close All Tools Windows macro post.

Hide the Main Menu

…And finally to remove the menu bar, I use this great Hide Main Menu extension which can be found in the Visual Studio gallery or loaded through Tools > Extension Manager.

Obviously working in this way will not suit everybody. You really need to be able to navigate your way round Visual Studio through the keyboard. Also some people are naturally more mouse driven and therefore won’t necessarily want to do any of it but I find this is what works best for me.