WordLight: highlights all occurrences of a selected text for VS2008

https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ad686131-47d4-4c13-ada2-5b1a9019fb6f

About

This is a small add-in for Visual Studio 2008. It searches and highlights substrings that are currently selected in a text editor. As a bonus, it works for Output, Command and Immediate windows too.

Project home: https://github.com/mnasyrov/wordlight

Usage

It is pretty simply: when you selects a text, the add-in highlights all occurrences in a current document.

There is a new "Freeze search" feature: you can freeze up to three search results in special mark groups, that stay during text editing. Freezing is called by next hotkeys (by default): Ctrl+`, Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 for three groups. For example: you select a text, and all its occurences are marked by pink color automatically. Then you press Ctrl+`, and these marks moved to the blue group. To clear a freezing group just press a hotkey when nothing is selected.

Installation

1. Unpack files to an folder for add-ins of your visual studio.
2. Restart the studio.

Usually, the folder is placed in "C:\Users\%UserName%\Documents\Visual Studio 2008" (for Win7) or "C:\Documents and Settings\%UserName%\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Addins" (for WinXP). It can be checked by "Add-in file paths" settings of the studio (menu Tools > Options > Environment > Add-in/Macros Security).

Please note, the add-in requires installed .NET Framework 3.5 to run.

Settings

You can change settings of the add-in by a command "WordLight settings..." under the "Tools" menu.

• Colors of marks for occurences;
• Hotkeys to freeze a search;
• Enable/disable case sensitive searching.
• Matching only whole words by search.

Tips and tricks

Visual Studio 2008 has various shortcut keys for text search, which look nice with WordLight:

• Ctrl+Shift+W - selects a word at a text cursor, I recommend to remap it to Ctrl+W;
• Ctrl+F - opens a Find dialog and puts a word at a text cursor into a search field;
• F3 / Shift+F3 - go to a next/previous occurrence of a search text;
• Ctrl+D - puts a word at a text cursor into a Find combo-box at a toolbar;
• Ctrl+F3 / Ctrl+Shift+F3 - puts a word at a text cursor into the Find combo-box and go to a next/previous its occurrence;
• Ctrl+I - Incremental search: waits for your input and searches as you type a text.