If you don't know about CTRL+I in Visual Studio...

Monday, July 28, 2008

If you don't know about CTRL+I in Visual Studio, go try it, I'll be waiting...

So? Ain't that cool?

(CTRL+I does incremental search, so it will progressively select the first occurrence of whatever you type. It's a lot less disruptive than CTRL+F as a means to search your files)

13 Comments

I used incremental search in the first version of Visual Studio for .NET, unfortunately I had to stop using it almost immediately because it doesn't search inside collapsed regions. This is a big shortcoming that makes the feature unusable in most cases.

Fabrice Marguerie - Wednesday, July 30, 2008 12:30:36 AM

That's if you use regions...

Bertrand Le Roy - Wednesday, July 30, 2008 12:39:52 AM

@Daniel: May seem obvious to you, but very few people know about this (I know some people in the VS team who didn't know about it...)

Bertrand Le Roy - Wednesday, July 30, 2008 5:27:07 PM

I never heard of it.

But looks like its ALT-I and not CTRL-I for my configuration (vb key mapping).

Al - Wednesday, July 30, 2008 6:40:55 PM

In order for CTRL + I to work you have to do a CTRL + F first to type the term(s) you want to search for.

Please correct me if I'm wrong

Christian Hagelid - Friday, August 1, 2008 1:10:57 AM

@Christian: you're wrong :) Press CTRL+I then start typing what you're looking for. It will automatically select the first occurence and update it as you type. Once you've got the sequence you want, you can use F3 to go to other occurences of the same sequence.

Bertrand Le Roy - Friday, August 1, 2008 4:29:52 AM

@Bertrand: Awesome! Very very handy now that I understand how to use it. Thanks.

Christian Hagelid - Sunday, August 3, 2008 10:46:21 PM

This feature is essentially identical to the search command in GNU Emacs (Ctrl+S). I couldn't find an equivalent for searching backwards though (i.e. Ctrl+R in Emacs)...

Dan P - Wednesday, August 20, 2008 9:54:20 AM

@Dan: use SHIFT+F3 once you've typed CTRL+I and your search string. It's not strictly equivalent to reverse incremental search but it comes close.

Bertrand Le Roy - Wednesday, August 20, 2008 5:56:31 PM

@Dan: and you can use CTRL+SHIFT+I to start searching from the bottom

Christian Hagelid - Friday, March 13, 2009 7:18:35 AM

thanks......used CTRL+I or ALT+I then type any word and then for incremental search type for that word press CTRL+F3 and For Backword Search use SHIFT+F3

Avinash Joshi - Saturday, September 5, 2009 7:19:25 AM

Any idea what happened to the Visual Studio 6 (vb) CTRL+I that showed the value of the constant?

Sel - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 1:50:37 PM

@Sel: no, but you could either "go to definition" or name your constants with an explicit name ;)

Bertrand Le Roy - Tuesday, December 15, 2009 7:22:14 PM

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