In Visual Studio 2012, the find dialog have been changed. When the new ‘Quick find’ dialog appears, the focus is on the textbox to enter text to find. In the majority of cases, what I want to change after entering my text to find is the scope. In Visual Studio 2010, the scope drop down list was focused immediatly after pressing tab. Now, I have to press tab multiples times or shift-tab 3 times just to set the focus on the scop drop down list because the options between the search textbox and the scope are ‘match whole word’, ‘match case’ and ‘regular expression’.
Is there any keyboard shortcut to speed-up this process? I see shortcuts for ‘match whole word’, “match case’ and ‘regular expression’ but no one for the scope.
Also, have you any idea why in Visual Studio 2012, when we press enter, we must have focus on the search textbox to execute a search? The find button in Visual Studio 2010 was defined as the ‘accept button’ but now, we must press F3 or click with the mouse on the find button to execute a search.
It can be perceived as little nice to have but theses missing features are for me a very big issue considering that I search in my solution dozens of times each day.
I finally found a solution.
After pressing ‘F3’ in the text editor to show the ‘Quick find’ dialog, the focus is on the textbox to enter a string to find. Press once the tab key to set the focus on the ‘Find Next’ button. After that, press the down arrow and the focus will immediatly be on the drop-down list to change the scope. After that, if you press the up arrow or the down arrow, you will change the scope in the drop-down list.