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dhoffman
New Member
5 Posts |
 Posted - Oct 08 2012 : 12:37:36 PM
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While the "Automatically highlight references to symbol under cursor" feature can be very useful, it can also be a real pain on large files, mainly due to it not making the distinction between a reference (e.g. a variable or function name) and a keyword. It is, for example, not very useful to me for it to highlight every instance of the word "if" every time I move the cursor over an "if" statement, and the amount of time it takes it to do that makes navigating large files very tedious.
Alternatively, (and maybe preferably) it would be nice to have that highlight references feature as a context-menu item, so you could turn off the automatic setting and only highlight when you choose to do so. |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18753 Posts |
Posted - Oct 08 2012 : 1:10:24 PM
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If you set:
VA Options -> Advanced -> Refactoring -> Automatically highlight references to symbol under cursor = Off
VA Options -> Advanced -> Display -> Highlight find results = On
and bind a keyboard shortcut to the command:
VAssistX.FindSelected
I have used Alt-K myself. Now just place the caret into a symbol, press the keyboard shortcut, and all references are highlighted. Press Escape to remove this highlighting. Since it is tied to an IDE find, the highlighting is stable, and does not change as you move the caret through the file. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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dhoffman
New Member
5 Posts |
Posted - Oct 08 2012 : 1:40:49 PM
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I'll admit that's an improvement. Doesn't have quite all of the features of "highlight references" - in particular it does not recognize actual references, merely text matches, so it does not detect scope, or distinguish between a changing reference vs. read-only, and also incorrectly matches substrings of larger strings, not just whole words. Anyhow, I can live with this for now, but just a suggestion for future versions.
For the record, I'm essentially using VAssistX as a replacement for Intellisense, which is so slow it's completely useless and actually more of a hindrance on a project this size. (Millions of lines, tens of thousands of files, almost 300 projects in the solution.) It's tough to find a work-flow that isn't so slow that it's impossible to get things done, so anything that causes even small additional delays is a serious problem when magnified to this scale. |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
18753 Posts |
Posted - Oct 08 2012 : 3:42:43 PM
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If you turn off "Automatically highlight references to symbol under cursor" and turn On the "Highlight all" check box in the Find References Results window, then you will get the full "intelligent" highlighting each time you run Find References, but no other time.
Does this help?
The slow response you are describing, is this limited to keywords? I am wondering if any common symbol name in the file would possibly have the same problem. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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Highlight references - NOT keywords
