Let’s say you are searching for some text, and you know about F3 and Shift+F3, so you want the Ctrl+F Quick Find or the Ctrl+H Quick Replace window to disappear after the first search.

Go to Tools – Options – Environment – Find and Replace page, and check the Hide Find and Replace window after a match is located for Quick Find or Quick Replace.

It’s funny to be wishing everyone happy halloween in the middle of summer (at the time of this writing), but Happy Halloween!!! from 3 months ago!

(my ghost drawing is the one on the left)

Press Ctrl+H to pop up the Quick Replace window.  The command is Edit.Replace, in case your keybindings are different.  You’ll need to press the Replace or Replace All button to invoke the find and replace. 

Additionally, you can customize your find and replace experience by expanding the Find options chevron control.

It’s funny, when i was writing up this tip, i started at the Find and Replace window trying to figure out where the option was to bookmark all of the results.  Finally, it jumped out at me.  =) 

If you hit Bookmark All instead of Find Next, bookmarks will be dropped at all the found locations.  In the picture below, I did a search for "true" in the current code block scope, but hit Bookmark all.

And if you’ve accidentally bookmarked half of your code by searching for a frequently-used search term (like i did the first time i tried this), simply open the Bookmark Tool Window (View – Bookmark Window), do a Ctrl+A to select all bookmarks, and then hit delete.

Technorati tags: VS2005Tip, VS2008Tip

Just select some text (or just have the cursor on the word you wish to search for) and press Ctrl+F3.  Ctrl+Shift+F3 will do a reverse search.

Note that a Ctrl+F3 search uses the following options: 

• is case sensitive
• searches hidden text
• allows for partial matching
• does not use regular expressions

Technorati tags: VS2005Tip, VS2008Tip

Obviously, you can press the Find Next button on the Find and Replace window,

but you can also press F3 to search for the next instance and Shfit+F3 searches for the previous instance of the search string. 

Technorati tags: VS2005Tip, VS2008Tip

When doing a quick find, you can select the scope of your search, including the current code block, current document, all open documents, current project, and entire solution.

Just press Ctrl+F to open the Quick Find window, and drop down the Look in to select the search scope.

Recall that this search scope will also apply to the Ctrl+D search experience.

Technorati tags: VS2005Tip, VS2008Tip

By pressing Ctrl+F, you can bring up the Find and Replace tool window.  You can then expand the Find options chevron control and select Search hidden text.  This is usually the first option I always set (or ensure is set).

Technorati tags: VS2005Tip, VS2008Tip

The standard keyboard shortcut for finding text in most applications is Ctrl+F.  In Visual Studio, this kicks off a Quick Find in the current document.

Quick Find will pre-populate the find what text with whatever text is selected in the editor or the word that the cursor is currently on.

Additionally, this find and replace window is actually a tool window (not a dialog), meaning that you can dock it somewhere and type in the editor with it opened.

Technorati tags: VS2005Tip, VS2008Tip

Whenever you can invoke statement completion, you can also execute the Edit.CompleteWord command.  This command will complete a word that is partially complete with no other possibilities.  And if there are other multiple possibilities, the command will invoke statement completion.

In the below example, since Console.WriteL has not other possible matches other than WriteLine, pressing Ctrl+Space or Alt+Right Arrow will write out WriteLine.

Technorati tags: VS2005Tip, VS2008Tip