Notepad++ like search highlighting in VisualStudio

Question

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!

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

The same feature is also available in Eclipse. Very useful.

Answer 3

Check out this question and the related answers: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/256931/how-to-highlight-occurrences-of-a-search-term-in-text-in-visual-studio

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

@nlinus: Thanks, RockScroll plugin is great! Now if only I could change the bgcolor.. :P