Visual Studio “Find in Files” does not work

Question

Visual Studio (2010, Ultimate) finds nothing when I do Find in Files (Ctrl+Shift+F) in the Entire Solution. However, it finds 2 occurrences when se

Answer 1

Like many other problems where VS simply stops to work properly, deleting the solutions .vs (located in the solution directory) seems to be a 'valid option'.

CAUTION: this will cause you to loose:

• breakpoints
• tabs / open documents
• currently set build configuration
• other non-vital information

... along with a lot of wrongly cached information that VS successfully managed to pile up leading to wrong find results.

I do this regularily when i encounter extreme lags even in debug-startups.

Answer 2

For me it started to work once I switched from "Find results 1 window" to "Find results 2 window" found in "Find and Replace" results option.

Answer 3

I had this problem in Visual Studio 2019 Professional. The above solutions did not work for me. I was able to solve this by:

1. Press cntl+F to open the find tool window
2. Expand the drop down of your search history

3. At the bottom of the drop down you should see Search Options and under that Find in Files..

   Somehow, my options got saved as Current Directory and the bin, obj, and packages sub directories.

4. Change the "Look in" item to any other option and it started to behave as expected.

Answer 4

This is obviously a way late answer but I did get here while looking for a solution to a somewhat similar issue and I'd like to share the fix which eventually worked:

Make sure you clear the "Look at these file types:" box from whitespaces which will prevent the search from running properly.

Answer 5

Following worked for me . Visual Studio-->Windows-->Reset Window Panel. The resizing of the visual studio made it to hide the option.