The Talented Mr. Edit.GoToFindCombo
In the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, “a young underachiever”. Ripley is gifted at improvisation and impersonation, but he takes an obsession too far.
Apparently our Visual Studio friend the “Go To Find Combo” (weird name, I know–from this point on I’m just going to call the dang thing the “Find” combo) is like Mr. Ripley–adaptive, talented, and full of secrets. If you don’t recognize it by name, the “Go To Find Combo” is the “Find” combo box in the Standard toolbar. (Shortcut: CTRL+/ or CTRL+D, depending on who you believe.)
In the recent Mastering .NET Debugging class I took, John Robbins clued us in to some of the crazy stuff this combo can do. I’m sure under the covers in the key processing code for this dialog there’s a huge “if/else if/else” statement. Just kidding.
Find
Okay, this is what we all know it does. Type in a search term, press enter, and it searches within the current document. Or press the “Find in Files” button (
) and it will display the Find in Files dialog with your search term pre-populated. It probably does so much more relating to searching, but that’s primarily how I use it.
Open A File By Name
Type the name of a file into the “Find” combo, then press CTRL+SHIFT+G (“Open File”), it will find and open the file you specified.
(Imagine me pressing CTRL+SHIFT+G in the screen shot above)
Create a New File By Name
Similar to opening a file, create a new file by typing a file name into the “Find” combo and pressing CTRL+N (“New File”). A new file with the specified name will be opened, but it’ll be up to you to save it to the correct place.
Set Breakpoints Instantly
Probably the coolest “hidden feature”, type the name of a Method into the “Find” combo and press F9. Notice that a breakpoint was automatically set on the opening brace of the method! And, if you’ve got overloads, notice that a breakpoint was set on every overload. For example, let’s say I have a “Show” method that has 3 overloads. Typing “Show” and pressing F9 sets these breakpoints:
But check out just how talented Edit.GoToFindCombo really is… using my example above, I’m going to type in “Show(Control)” and press F9 to set a breakpoint specifically on the Show(Control control) method. What happens?
It sets a breakpoint on both the Show(IWin32Window) and Show(Control) overloads. Why? Because the Control class implements the IWin32Window interface! So my “search term” for the breakpoint matched two possible overloads, and it was smart enough to know that. Great stuff.
Commands
Anything you can type into the command window you can also type into the Find combo. Just prefix it with “>” and intellisense will guide you. For example, to open a file, type “>open ” plus the first letter of a file. Or you can execute macros, etc. The sky is the limit!
Execute a command window command
Execute a macro, custom or otherwise
Update: Sara Ford shows us one more useful feature. Type in a line number and press CTRL+G to jump to the line. Is there no end to the madness?? 
September 11th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
>of does the same as >open. Are these commands documented anywhere?
September 11th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Yep, they’re documented here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c3a0kd3x(VS.80).aspx
And, here’s a good tip from that page:
“Type >alias in the Command window to display a list of the current aliases and their definitions. Type >cls to clear the contents of the Command window.”
September 11th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
[...] Here’s another post outlining even more tricks with the Find [...]
September 12th, 2007 at 8:57 am
[...] After this post made the front page of DotNetKicks, Aaron Lerch wrote a post on his blog with more things that you can do with the find combo. One thing that is very useful is [...]
September 12th, 2007 at 9:02 am
Great post. It is much more informative that the one I posted at http://www.alteridem.net/2007/09/11/quickly-findopen-a-file-in-visual-studio/, so I made an update and linked back to this one.
September 15th, 2007 at 10:30 am
[...] The Talented Mr. Edit.GoToFindCombo by Aaaron Lerch [...]
February 1st, 2008 at 6:24 am
[...] There seems to be quite a lot of cool crouching-tiger-hidden-features in VS 2005 (i.e. features that are not very discoverable). [...]
March 27th, 2008 at 12:26 am
[...] if that wasn’t enough Aaron Lerch posted The Talented Mr. Edit.GoToFindCombo which lists some other cool features of the “Quick find combo”. Published Wednesday, March 26, [...]
March 27th, 2008 at 2:39 am
For some reason the “Find” is not in the Standard Toolbar. Any Ideas?
June 13th, 2008 at 3:19 am
[...] blog post describes several other commands such as opening and creating files and setting breakpoints. The [...]
February 18th, 2010 at 9:25 am
After some struggle to recreate the behaviour I had in VS2005 in VS2008, understood the importance of Tools.GoToCommandLine and the difference between Tools.GoToCommandLine and Edit.GoToFindCombo. We need to map both Tools.GoToCommandLine and Edit.GoToFindCombo. The former ensures that the FindCombo turns into a [mini] command window, and this means you get the command prompt “>” inserted for you, and this auto insertion really makes a difference, believe me.
In VS2008 I had wrongly mapped Ctrl+/ to Edit.GoToFindCombo and was typing the “>” everytime to turn on the command mode. Not anymore. Ctrl+/ is mapped to Tools.GoToCommandLine. Ctrl+Shift+/ is mapped to Edit.GoToFindCombo. I am using Visual C# keyboard bindings and under this mapping, binding Ctrl+D to Edit.GoToFindCombo is not a great idea.
To summarize, map
Tools.GoToCommandLine Ctrl + /
Edit.GoToFindCombo Ctrl + Shift + /