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

user_16470 0
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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 "Find Results" window.

No files were found to look in. Find stopped progress

Once this message shows up, all the subsequent searches will result in the same message. Nothing fixes the problem including restarting the computer except pressing Ctrl + ScrLk.

What causes Visual Studio to get into this state and is there a setting to permanently prevent it from happening?

visual-studio
15 Answers

I don't think there is anything you can do to prevent it. It seems to occur after I have stopped a build with CTRL+Break...Maybe I am pressing CTRL+Scroll Lock during that time???

I have only had it happen to me 2-3 times, and that was several months apart.

What he is saying is that occasionally when performing a search within Visual Studio you get the mentioned error message. Even though you know there is stuff to find. It is some weird state that Visual Studio gets into. If you press the (CTRL+Scroll Lock) it will 'fix' the issue.

Brian_Schmitt_304920

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!

user_279680

I have found another cause of this: Moving the solution folder to a new location, when CMake is part of the build process.

I was working with the Chromium Embedded Framework and moved the main CEF folder from e:\ to c:\ . This seems to break everything including Find because the CMake build scripts it uses hard-code the disk volume and full path (E:\folder) into the source paths.

user_22874270

To be clear, Press Ctrl + ScrlLck, with the Search Window open. That resolved it for me too.

user_88865890
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