Alex Le’s Blog

VSFileFinder is an awesome utility to help you navigate through your jungle of source files within VisualStudio. Originally developed by Jonathan Payne for VS2003 and updated to work for VS2005, VSFileFinder does it job quite well. In fact, if you code in VisualStudio for a living and haven’t installed VSFileFinder2005 yet, then please do yourself a big favor and do it now. Your 5 minutes downloading and installing the app will pay itself 100 times through productivity gain. I hate digging through hundreds of files to find the correct file - especially for web projects. When it’s getting closed to 5:00pm on a Friday afternoon, you know you have better stuff to finish up than straining your eyes finding a “i_forgot_where_you_are.cs” source file in your 20+ projects solution.

However, I’m spoiled by the Go-To-File (Ctrl + Shift + T) feature of E-TextEditor. Within E, the “Go To File” feature will does partial filename matching while the original VSFileFinder2005 only does exact string matching on the filename. For example, we have a list of files like this:

1. test.html
2. test_123a.rb
3. hello_zasdf.rb

If you type “t_“, E will match (2) while VSFileFinder2005 won’t match any file. Searching for “_a” will match (2) and (3) in E while nothing with VSFileFinder2005.
To me, partial filename matching is far more developer-friendly than exact string matching. Since Jonathan put his source code up on his site, I decided to update VSFileFinder2005 to do partial filename matching. I converted the matching algorithm to use a simple regular expression that matches any character in the filename with the search string. A search string such as “test” will be converted to “.*[t].*[e].*[s].*[t].*”

Here’s the result in both E and VS2005



Now my VSFileFinder will feel like E again.

I tried to contact Jonathan to let him know about my little tweak, however, his gmail account doesn’t work anymore. Hence I’ll publish the original source with my modification as well as the MSI installer for your convenience.

Happy coding!

Download:

• Source: VSFileFinder2005 - LaunchStyle - Source
• Installer:VSFileFinder2005 - Launchy Style - Installer

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Entry posted at 1:59 am on Friday, October 19th, 2007, and it is filed under Random Walk

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