Entrian Source Search

is a powerful search plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio. It's the fastest way to search and navigate your source code.

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The free trial gives you 30 individual days of usage.

Volume discount:
5 or more users: $24 each

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Customer soundbite:

“It's a product I heartily recommend to visual studio developers, especially at the very reasonable price.”

– Dan P, UK
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Entrian Source Search: QuickStart Guide

If you just want to dive in and get going, this page gives you a quick overview of Entrian Source Search. For all the details, see the Online Manual.

Installation

When you first install Entrian Source Search, it adds a new tool window to Visual Studio. It's a good idea to dock this along the bottom of your workspace.

Indexing

Entrian Source Search builds a full-text index of all the text files in one or more folder trees - when you load a solution that it hasn't seen before, you tell it which root folder(s) to index. (So it indexes files that Visual Studio doesn't know about - ChangeLogs, documentation, header files, everything.)

Indexing is pretty much automatic; for more details on how it works and how to configure it, see Indexing.

The Search Window

This is the Entrian Source Search window - normally you'd dock it along the bottom of Visual Studio. For full details on what all the pieces do, see the Search Window.

Searching

Entrian Source Search supports a wide range of searching and filtering options - here's a summary. To see this summary from within the Search window, hover your mouse over the Search box and it will appear in a tooltip.

Searching:
myVariable	Search for a word
myVariable1 myVariable2	Search for several words (with Phrase Search turned off)
"int myVariable"	Search for a phrase (with Phrase Search turned off)
int myVariable	Search for a phrase (with Phrase Search turned on)
int myV*	Single-token wildcard (an asterisk next to alphanumeric characters expands to single-word matches)
"this * that"	Multi-token wildcard, single line (an asterisk on its own matches unlimited tokens on the same line)
"this *:100 that"	Multi-token wildcard, limited to 100 tokens, multi-line
char\*	To search for an asterisk, escape it with a backslash
loose:"this and that"	Search for words that are near to each other, in any order
loose50:"A B C"	Tune the looseness: allow gaps of 50 tokens
Filtering:
myVar ext:cpp	Search only within *.cpp files
myVar dir:utils/misc	Search only within matching directories
2017 -file:ChangeLog	Search all files except ChangeLogs
age:30m	Show only files modified in the past 30 minutes
-age:3d12h	Show only files not modified in the past 3.5 days

For all the details on the syntax and options for searching and filtering, see Searching.

Keyboard shortcuts

The main keyboard shortcuts are (by default):

Alt+= search for the word under the cursor (or the selected text if there is any).
F8 jumps to the next hit, loading the source file into the editor.
Shift+F8 jumps to the previous hit.
Shift+Alt+F opens the Search box with a file: filter in place, ready to use autocomplete or wildcards to open a file by name. That's a really quick way to open any file in your source tree.
Shift+Alt+= just activates the Search box, ready for you to type.

For a full list of all the available keyboard shortcuts, see Keyboard shortcuts.

The manual

This page only skims the surface - see the full manual for all the depth:

Entrian Source Search makes Visual Studio faster and more productive to use. and try it for yourself.