Visual Studio: Is there an incremental search for the entire solution?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

ReSharper has some really nice navigation and search features, including an incremental Go To Type search which works across the whole solution.

Answer 3

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).