What is the difference between Incremental Search (Ctrl + I) and Quick Find (Ctrl + F) in Visual Studio?
as I said in the comment of mine , that's not the only reason and microsoft would not implement something like this for just being easier to use !
by the way you don't need F3 to navigate between the results in the normal find method . you can do that with hitting enter and hell yea , its easier than Ctrl+I.
You can press Ctrl-I and start to type and all occurrences of what you type get highlight throughout the document, and also added to the find buffer, so F3 then works on the typed text as-well as the normal find method.
Incremental search allows developers to search in document without blocking UI and allow to search as they type.
The very good reason to use Ctrl+I is it find the result as you type the term in the box and you don't need to hit enter or F3 to go to the first result .
How To :
To enable incremental search, just type “Ctrl + i” within the editor.
This will subtly change your cursor, and cause your status bar at the
bottom left of the IDE to change to “Incremental search: (search
term)” – you can then type the search term you are searching for and
the editor will search for it from the current source location you are
on (no dialog required).
Note that the version of Visual Studio will affect the UI differences. It seems that in older versions e.g. 2010, the find dialog was quite obtrusive, and got in the way of things and so incremental search was by comparison more streamlined. Conversely, running on Visual Studio 2015 I've found that the Find Dialog (at least the one launched by CTRL-F) is very unobtrusive, since it is embedded in the top left of the code editor. Hitting CTRL-I in fact launches a similar dialog with fewer options. Furthermore I also find with this version of VS the editor jumps to the first matching occurrence as with incremental search, so there is barely any difference in terms of how streamlined/unobtrusive one is over the other.
Assuming one is using a version of Visual Studio where the Find Dialog is embedded in the corner, the only reason I can think to use incremental search over the standard find is the fact that you can reverse search with CTRL-SHIFT-I (the alternative would be to CRTL-F to go to the next occurrence, then SHIFT-F3 to go backwards).
Long story short: it looks like the standard find has been modernised somewhat bringing it closer to the incremental search. If using VS2015 (not sure about 2017) the difference appears to be fairly negligible besides the differences in shortcuts, and so is really a matter of preference. Personally, in VS2015 I find the incremental search to be of little improvement over the standard find, and so I'll be sticking to the latter (unless I've missed something in which case I'll be glad to hear about it!)
Incremental search allows you to keep hitting Ctrl+I until you hit the end of your document. Quick Find finds the first hit, highlights every other hit but you'd need some additional keys to go the the next hit (F3 with standard keybinds).
Related
Just upgraded to VS 2019... and by default (in this and previous versions)... if I search within a document, every subsequent search I make for the same text searches relative to the previous find result... not where I reposition the cursor. I know it is possible to reset the search by moving the cursor... but how? The setting is frustratingly elusive... and not being able to rely on finding the first result after a specific point without first searching for something else, then what you actually want to find, is doubly frustrating! :-(
In this situation, unable to fight design, it might be better served to take a different way of looking/thinking and use CTRL F to do a "find all" into a search results dialog. Then instead move around the Find Locations as needed.
Otherwise you would need to cancel the initial search and restart the search after moving the cursor to the new location.
When I'm trying to search for something in the current document, I think it's really annoying that VS immediately starts trying to find a match when I've only typed a single character. The document ends up jumping all over the place, causing me to lose my spot. Is there any way to make it so VS doesn't start looking for results until I actually hit enter?
You could just use the find and replace dialog instead of quick find. ctrl+shift+F or Edit > Find And Replace > Find in Files. Then just switch the dropdown to current document. Although this creates a list that you can click through rather than navigating directly.
I am not sure what is the best way to word my question correctly in single line. But basically I have seen quite a few video tutorials now where the coder types really fast using some sort of shortcut to fill in the automatic text(prolly intellisense stuff) It looks very similar to Linux command line tab where you only type half of your text and when you hit tab it either fills in the gap or show you the remaining options.
Hope that makes sense.
Thanks
Pressing Ctrl+Space completes the current variable/class you are typing.
Typing things like ctor and then pressing the Tab key twice tells Visual Studio to insert a constructor for you. (Also works with for for a for loop, cw for a Console.WriteLine();, etc.)
For a full list, please refer to the official reference from MSDN.
I believe its Ctrl-Space, which is pretty common among most IDE's
Does anybody know a light plug-in that do (same as Resharper) go to implementation and the quick search for a file where you just insert few characters and it shows the matches? I just want to get rid of Resharper cause it slows me down a lot!!
To answer the original question, as per this post by Andrew Arnott, you can use Ctrl+/ to move the cursor to the Find text box in the toolbar, then type ">of" and start typing file names. The matching files will appear as you type.
Using the ">" prefix causes the find text box to act as the command window would.
(Note that the Ctrl+/ short-cut may be overridden by ReSharper to comment a line of code, so this short-cut only works with ReSharper uninstalled.)
That's interesting. I use ReSharper and it uses about 400mb of RAM. I would consider that pretty low usage.
Maybe you can look into Productivity Power Tools (I don't use it).
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d0d33361-18e2-46c0-8ff2-4adea1e34fef/
Long ago in a former editor, there was the ability to begin a macro, and then "open" the text selection...such that if your next action was to, say, search for some string - the text selection would then extend to that spot.
This was a great way to do fairly sophisticated operations without having to use wildcards or regular expressions.
Is there a similar facility in Visual Studio 2008?
Ctrl-= is the answer.
It is the 'SelectToLastGoBack' command, officially documented as "Selects from the current location in the editor back to the previous location in the navigation history". So, get the cursor where you want to begin your selection (preferably using something reliably repeatable like a search), start a new search (usually I like ctrl-I better than ctrl-F because I can see what it's doing, but ctrl-I seems to not work right in macros), have the search end where you want to end it (esc to close search box), and hit control equals to select back to where you started.
Unfortunately I can't really find anything that explains in detail how the editor decides what the previous location in navigation history is.