I am very fond of the keyboard shortcuts built into Visual Studio. One of my favorites is Ctrl+i, which triggers the incremental search. It jumps over the text in the current document as I fill in the searchword. After the desired searchword is typed, I use F3 to jump through the matches.
It works fine, except that is is limited to searching in the current document. Also, triggering incremental search, automatically changes the Look In option in the Find And Replace dialog to Current Document.
Is there an incremental search for the entire solution? Is there a keyboard shortcut for it? Or at the very least is there a way to prevent an usage of incremental search from changing the Look In option?
I use Ctrl-Shift-F which is Find in Files. Once I get a list of results, you can hit F8 and Shift-F8 to cycle through them. Ctrl-I does not affect the scope of this search.
Also, after you've found your first match with Ctrl-I, you don't have to hit F3, you can just hit Ctrl-I and Ctrl-Shift-I to cycle through the matches.
In addition, a quick way to jump to a specific file or class is to use something like SonicFileFinder
ReSharper has some really nice navigation and search features, including an incremental Go To Type search which works across the whole solution.
Visual Sidekick performs incremental search over the whole solution. You can search for file names and for symbols names as well. This tool has been a huge time saver for the C++ development we do. It is ridiculous that Visual Sidekick works better than Visual Studio's own IntelliSense. It hasn't been updated in a while though and doesn't support Visual Studio 2010 yet. ReSharper doesn't seem to support C++ though.
Visual Assist X supports many languages (C++, C#, VB, ASP/ASP.NET, HTML, XML, JavaScript, VBScript, XAML) but it offers a lot of refactoring tools that usually don't work with C++ (e.g. Find References) because C++ is so difficult to parse (macros, templates, etc).
Related
Is there a built-in feature or available add-on for Visual Studio 2010 that will clean up spacing in C++ code so that annoying blocks like this:
RandomVar=RandomList.RandomMethod();
will become
RandomVar = RandomList.RandomMethod();
(Same goes for spacing in loops, etc.)
...or do I need to do this myself with find/replace and regex?
I think You are looking for Edit->Advanced->Format document. This will re-format your current document according to settings in Tools->Options->Text Editor->c/c++->Formatting.
It's keyboard shortcut Ctrl+E+D in my case.
Although originally for C code formatting lint has been modified to cover C++ and ported to many platforms.
Some lint variants only report inconsistent layout, others can fix it for you. some are free others paid for versions.
This would be an outside the IDE fix as this is a sperate tool (at least traditionally it is!)
This wikipeadia article lists a few possible sources for lint tools
(this was a footer in my orginal question, but as that posed two solutions I extracted it here so you can accept a specifc answer should you find one apropriate)
This is not a proper "Solution" but a possible work-around without the need for finding external tools
In the "Tools" menu pick "Options..."
In this dialog navigate to
"Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Formatting"
Set the layout options as you
would like your code to look.
Click OK.
Now in a unit with "bad"
formatting from the menu select "Edit->Advanced->Format document" and the IDE wil reformat the
document to match your settings.
For C#, VB etc the "Formating" option has several sub nodes that provide a fine grain of control for the sort of spacing options you ask for. The list for C/C++ is flat and very limited by comparison. I suspect there is not enough flexability for the layout you want.
So you probably cannot get the formatting you want directly. How about...
Set the spacing rules you want for C++ in the C# settings
Temporarily adding a C# project to your solution
adding a class to that
emptying it.
paste the C++ in (causing a reformat)
copy back to the original file
rinse and repeat
remove the temporary C# project
I have to say this is not pretty, but given the syntactical similarities between C++ and C# its probably a close match.
The auto-formatting settings for C++ in Eclipse are more extensive than in Visual Studio, so I ended up using that instead.
I develop WPF and Silverlight application so I use source file links a lot. When I search for something, Visual Studio displays multiple same results in Find Results window - one for each file link which looks quite cluttered.
Is there a way (setting/plugin) to make the search results in Find Results window distinct?
If you are searching C, C++, or C# code consider using the Sando Code Search Tool (a free, open-source extension for Visual Studio). It eliminates duplicate results in many cases, only returning a single result for each program element (i.e., class, method, or field) that is relevant.
Here is an animated gif of it in action:
Full Disclosure: I am the project lead for this extension so I may be biased :)
I did one more search in Visual Studio gallery and I've eventually found what want: Ultra Find
It offers a few more features than the standard VS Find in Files but more importantly it shows only distinct results for linked files!
There are much better "find" or "navigation" plug-ins out there. I personally use ReSharper's Navigation and Search features to find whatever I need within a few keystrokes.
CodeRush and JustCode have similar features, too.
By selecting "Display file names only" in the options for "Find in files" it limits the results list to unique entry per file with matches.
This may be a more useful view of the search results for your usage?
I've been using Solution Explorer since I started with VS 2k3 and at this point my preference is as much inertia as anything else, so I'm wondering what features the other solution visualization options in Visual Studio had that might make them more useful.
I could just fiddle with the other two, but that method's much better at identifying what features they don't have that Solution Explorer does than at spotting what they do better.
The Solution Navigator is part of the Power Tools, not Visual Studio (directly). It is basically a replacement for Solution Explorer and Class View both (which are part of VS, and have been for a long time), as well as giving you the ability to search quickly for things, pivot on a type or file, etc.
The searching feature is by far the one that I use the most in Solution Navigator. Being able to search very quickly for types and files within your solution is very powerful once you get used to the functionality.
I have yet to find a faster way to open a file than with Solution Navigator.
Either copy and paste or type a file name into the search box
Double-click the resulting file
Notepad++ has a neat feature that combines search and highlighting. When you select a word, it is highlighted wherever else it shows up on the page, so it is an implicit search, which I find very very useful.
Is there a way to get that into VS?
I would also be interested in having these highlightings stick so that I can highlight more than one keyword (using different bgcolor of course), and even have all these keywords get highlighted automatically on the newer pages I open after making them stick. Now that would be really cool!
Check out this question and the related answers:
How to highlight occurrences of a search term in text in Visual Studio?
Visual Studio 2010 will introduce a feature called "Highlight References" for symbols in C# and Visual Basic and it will behave as you describe. The "sticky" highlight however is not supported yet (in 2010).
The same feature is also available in Eclipse. Very useful.
Sara Ford has a post on her blog about making a custom editor. Might be a good starting point for investigating writing your own addin or editor for achieving your goal.
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2006/08/09/693548.aspx
If you've ever used Eclipse, you've probably noticed the great keyboard shortcuts that let you hit a shortcut key combination, then just type the first few characters of a function, class, filename, etc. It's even smart enough to put open files first in the list.
I'm looking for a similar functionality for Visual Studio 2008. I know there's a findfiles plugin on codeproject, but that one is buggy and a little weird, and doesn't give me access to functions or classes.
Vs11 (maybe 2010 had it too) has the Navigate To... functionality which (on my machine) has the Ctrl+, shortcut.
By the way it understands capitals as camelcase-shortucts (eclipse does so too). For instance type HH to get HtmlHelper.
This isn't exactly the same as Eclipse from your description, but Visual Studio has some similar features out of the box (I've never used Visual Assist X, but it does sound interesting).
The Find ComboBox in the toolbar ends up being a sort of "Visual Studio command line". You can press Ctrl+/ (by default) to set focus there, and Visual Studio will insert an ">" at the beginning of the text (indicating that you want to enter a command instead of search). It even auto-completes as you type, helping you to find commands.
Anyway, to open a file from there, type "open <filename>". It will display any matching files in the drop down as you type (it pulls the list of files from the currently open solution).
To quickly navigate to a function, in the code editor press Ctrl+I to start an incremental search. Then just start typing until you find what you are looking for. Press Escape to cancel the search, or F3 to search again using the same query. As you are typing in the search query, the status bar in the lower left corner will contain what Visual Studio is searching for. Granted, this won't search across multiple files (I've never used Eclipse much, but that sounds like what it does from your description), but hopefully it will help you at least a little bit.
If anyone stumbles upon this thread:
There's a free plugin (created by me) for Visual Studio 2008 that mimics the Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+R Open Resource dialog (note, not the Open Type dialog). It works with any language and/or project type.
You can find it at Visual Studio Gallery.
Some of the neat features are available in Visual Assist X, though not all of them. I've asked on their forums, but they haven't appeared as yet. VAX gets updated regularly on a rough 4 week period for bug fixes and a new feature every couple of months.
If you are looking for an add-in like this to quickly navigate to source files in your project:
try the Visual Studio 2005/2008 add-in SonicFileFinder.
Resharper does this with the Ctrl-N keyword. Unfortunately it doesn't come for free.
Visual Studio doesn't have anything like this feature beyond Find.
Found this thread while searching for Eclipse's Ctrl+Shift+R, and after seeing the Visual Studio Gallery, found the DPack Tools (they are free, and no, I'm not endorsed in any way by them).
But it's exactly what I was searching:
- Alt+U -> File Browser (a la Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+R)
- Alt+M -> Code Browser (Method list in the actual class)
It has more features, but I'm happy with these ones.
I have been using biterScripting along with Visual Studio to do more flexible searching and manipulation.
It can search the entire workspace.
It can search within any project - EVEN IF THAT PROJECT IS NOT LOADED OR EVEN PART OF A WORKSPACE.
It can find things using regular expressions.
AND, ABOVE ALL, it can make bulk changes. For example, want to change the name of a class from CCustomer to CUser, I can do it in just a few command lines - Actually, I have written scripts for things like this I do often. I DON'T HAVE TO CLICK ON EACH INSTANCE AND MANUALLY DO THE CHANGE.
And, it is inexpensive ($0). I downloaded it from http://www.biterscripting.com .
I'm also comming from the Java Development side and was looking for the CTRL+T feature in the Visual Studio. The other answers refer to open file, but since in C# the class name and file name can be different this is not what i was looking for.
With the Class View or the Object Browser you can search for Objects and Classes
[View]->[Class View] or [View]->[Object]