Quickly finding a file in a solution

  • Article

When watching folks look for a file or attempt to find something in a list of items, I find there are really two kinds of folks - "browsers" and "searchers". A "browser" appreciates having a hierarchy and being able to navigate to their particular file. A "searcher" appreciates the type-ahead features of the treeview and listview to find a particular item, or types in a wildcard in filename box to reduce the number of entries.

For the "searchers" out there like me, a large solution in VS can become problematic. The solution - use the command window to open a file.

  • Open the command window (Control+Alt+A)
  • > open Foo.cs

This will autocomplete to all the Foo.cs'es in your solution, so you dont have to find it.