Notepad++ like search highlighting in VisualStudio

Question

Notepad++ has a neat feature that combines search and highlighting. When you select a word, it is highlighted wherever else it shows up on the page, so it is an implicit search, which I find very very useful.

Is there a way to get that into VS?

I would also be interested in having these highlightings stick so that I can highlight more than one keyword (using different bgcolor of course), and even have all these keywords get highlighted automatically on the newer pages I open after making them stick. Now that would be really cool!

Wintry

Answer 1

Check out this question and the related answers: How to highlight occurrences of a search term in text in Visual Studio?

Globeflower

@All (From the links above ) This is the straight answer visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/… – Beaverette

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2010 will introduce a feature called "Highlight References" for symbols in C# and Visual Basic and it will behave as you describe. The "sticky" highlight however is not supported yet (in 2010).

Iulus

Answer 3

The same feature is also available in Eclipse. Very useful.

Gerard

Answer 4

Sara Ford has a post on her blog about making a custom editor. Might be a good starting point for investigating writing your own addin or editor for achieving your goal.

http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2006/08/09/693548.aspx

Cumquat