"Replace" vs. "Replace and find next" in Visual Studio 2013 Professional

Question

Hello,
Sometimes, when doing a large/risky replacement, I would like to find a hit, do a single replacement, inspect the replacement, then find the next hit, do a single replacement, inspect the replacement, and so on, before finally
doing ‘Replace All’. Visual Studio seems to find the next hit immediately after executing the current replacement. Is there a way to change this default behaviour? It would be a really nice feature.
I have looked in Options > Environment > Find and Replace, but the options listed are not relevant to my requirement.
Many thanks.
Keith
R K Howard

Answer 1

Nope.  You can't do exactly that.
There are alternative approaches though.
ONE
If you use the Replace In Files feature (Ctrl+Shift+H) you can select the scope of your find to be Current Document (or whatever is appropriate for you) and make use of the Result options to List results in a find results window.  Do
a Replace All, and then you can curate your results individually by navigating through them in the find results window.  If you check "Keep modified files open after Replace All" then an undo operation on any modified file will restore
the effects of the replace all, should you need to back out of your changes.
The difference between this approach and your approach is that with my suggestion, all the replacements are made ahead of time, and it keeps a list of all such places that need to be reviewed.
This is my preferred approach.
TWO
If you use the Find All feature it places a reference to each location in the Find Results window. (Find all is chosen by clicking the dropdown arrow to the right of the Find Next button in the Find window -- no keyboard shortcut for this that I
know of.)  After each replacement you can click on the line you replaced and navigate back to it. If you're only going to do a few, this is a reasonable thing to do.
THREE
I don't usually find it too difficult to pre-visualize what the replacement will be.  I am curating the results before I do each replacement.  It selects the text for you so you can see
where the replacement will go.  I realize that it doesn't show you what the replacement will be for something like a backreference, but it's not usually too difficult to figure out, is it?
This might be the "suck it up" approach.
FOUR
Write an add-in.  It is possible, (although quite a bit of work), to augment Visual Studio in this way using a
VSPackage.