Visual Studio “Find” results in “No files were found to look in. Find stopped progress.”

Question

Sometimes while developing in Visual Studio IDE, when you use \"Find in Files\" dialog to find something, the search fails and you will see the following message in the \"F

Answer 1

I have had this problem and saw peoples' answers about the multiple Ctrl + Break/Pause Scroll Lock combinations.

I considered this, but I thought it a poor workaround (especially as I use a Mac Keyboard so those keys are not easily available).

So the solution I found was to do this:

1. Menu: Tools → Options → Environment → Find and Replace

2. Uncheck the top three check boxes (checked by default in my settings).

3. Re-check the top three check boxes.

Et voila, everything should work fine.

Well, it did for me anyway, which was a relief as I can't believe Microsoft would allow a weird key combination as a work around for a bug like this.

I submit this hoping it may help!

Answer 2

I encountered a very similar problem. I was searching a folder for all files for a phrase in all .cs files in my solution. Visual Studio kept saying "No files were found to look in". (It did not have the "Find stopped progress" part of the message.)

I searched for the message and found this question. The suggested keyboard commands in other answers did not work.

I like to use the keyboard for navigation. I had accidentally hit Alt+B and Space. Alt+B is the shortcut to jump to the "Include sub-folders" checkbox on the Find and Replace form. The space bar cleared the checkbox, and then Alt+A performed a Find All action. Because it was not searching sub-folders, no files were found. The message was correct.

After checking the "Include sub-folders" box, searches found the matching files in sub-folders. So if you're getting the message "No files were found to look in" without the message "Find stopped progress", ensure the search is looking in sub-folders!