One of the most annoying behaviours of Visual Studios search dialog - removing unwanted "default" values for Visual Studio search di

Have you found yourself frustrated about Visual Studio acting retarded on the values specified in search dialog ? I sure did. It was so frustrating when I wanted to search through whole project, no matter what file extensions and without ‘Word match’ option turned on. What Visual Studio has to say on this topic ? No can do mister..You specified few days ago, in one of your searches, that you want narrow your results to *.cs files and the search phrase have to match exactly the word, so from that moment on, I assume you want to search for it EVERY SINGLE TIME you open the search dialog..

Yes Visual Studio, you are right, I specified that, but you are just a retard to assume that I wanted those setting to be treated as a default

Anyhow..I was just tired of seeing this window, every time I clicked CTRL + SHIFT + F to search through the whole project, and having to clear those preserved and unwanted settings, that for some, unknown for me, reasons Visual Studio keeps them and treats as default. So annoying..

Unfortunately there’s no easy way of removing those settings. What you have to do is to open the registry and change some values. I’m opening Registry Editor with the shortcut of WINDOW BUTTON + R (opens a Run window) and typing, in it, regedit and hitting enter

after that you should be prompted with this window

Now you have to navigate to (bear in mind that your version of Visual Studio might be different)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Find

Locate the Filter # item(s) and DialogOptions. Those are the ones that are responsible for your misery and they need to ‘vanish’. What you want to do is to clear the values of the Filter # ones (set to empty string) and for the DialogOptions you have to change (in my case) WholeWord flag to be 0. BEFORE you start doing changes in the registry ALWAYS make a backup by Exporting.. the registry to a file

Second thing BEFORE making changes to those items (Filter # and DialogOptions) is to close all the Visual Studio instances that you’re currently running. If you won’t close them the settings will keep coming back. My guess is that when you close Visual Studio it updates those values in registry with whatever it has in cache, hence your changes will be overridden. So..having that done we can start making amendments in the registry entries.

After making those changes, your registry view should be something like so (blanks for Filter # and changed flags for DialogOptions)

Now, your search dialog should get back to normal (default)