Incremental Search vs Quick Find in Visual Studio

Question

What is the difference between Incremental Search (Ctrl + I) and Quick Find (Ctrl + F) in Visual Studio?

Answer 1

Note that the version of Visual Studio will affect the UI differences. It seems that in older versions e.g. 2010, the find dialog was quite obtrusive, and got in the way of things and so incremental search was by comparison more streamlined. Conversely, running on Visual Studio 2015 I've found that the Find Dialog (at least the one launched by CTRL-F) is very unobtrusive, since it is embedded in the top left of the code editor. Hitting CTRL-I in fact launches a similar dialog with fewer options. Furthermore I also find with this version of VS the editor jumps to the first matching occurrence as with incremental search, so there is barely any difference in terms of how streamlined/unobtrusive one is over the other.

Assuming one is using a version of Visual Studio where the Find Dialog is embedded in the corner, the only reason I can think to use incremental search over the standard find is the fact that you can reverse search with CTRL-SHIFT-I (the alternative would be to CRTL-F to go to the next occurrence, then SHIFT-F3 to go backwards).

Long story short: it looks like the standard find has been modernised somewhat bringing it closer to the incremental search. If using VS2015 (not sure about 2017) the difference appears to be fairly negligible besides the differences in shortcuts, and so is really a matter of preference. Personally, in VS2015 I find the incremental search to be of little improvement over the standard find, and so I'll be sticking to the latter (unless I've missed something in which case I'll be glad to hear about it!)

Answer 2

as I said in the comment of mine , that's not the only reason and microsoft would not implement something like this for just being easier to use !

by the way you don't need F3 to navigate between the results in the normal find method . you can do that with hitting enter and hell yea , its easier than Ctrl+I.

You can press Ctrl-I and start to type and all occurrences of what you type get highlight throughout the document, and also added to the find buffer, so F3 then works on the typed text as-well as the normal find method.

Incremental search allows developers to search in document without blocking UI and allow to search as they type.

The very good reason to use Ctrl+I is it find the result as you type the term in the box and you don't need to hit enter or F3 to go to the first result .

How To :

To enable incremental search, just type “Ctrl + i” within the editor. This will subtly change your cursor, and cause your status bar at the bottom left of the IDE to change to “Incremental search: (search term)” – you can then type the search term you are searching for and the editor will search for it from the current source location you are on (no dialog required).

Answer 3

Incremental search allows you to keep hitting Ctrl+I until you hit the end of your document. Quick Find finds the first hit, highlights every other hit but you'd need some additional keys to go the the next hit (F3 with standard keybinds).