Erasing the Find/Replace History on Visual Studio 2010

Question

I've looked around online to try to find a way to delete the history of VS 2010's Find/Replace feature, but all I've gotten are answers only valid for previous versions (VS 05, VS 08, etc.). Does anyone know how clear it for the 2010 version? Thanks!

Answer 1

Open regedit.exe, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Find. Remove all keys that starts with Find and Replace, like Find1, Find2, Replace1, etc. You can remove history for Find only or Replace only, or remove only particular Find, if you want to.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER user is for user that is currently logged in.

If you need to clear history for another user, you need to go to HKEY_USERS\{UserId}\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Find

For example HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2705333110-2095705488-3072420928-1000\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Find.

[EDIT]

Step-by-step:

1. Make a quick console application:

   using Microsoft.Win32;  public static void Main() {     var findKey = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey(@"Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Find", true);     findKey.GetValueNames()         .Where(arg => Regex.IsMatch(arg, @"^Find( \d+)?$"))         .ToList()         .ForEach(findKey.DeleteValue); } 

2. Compile it and close VS.

3. Run the compiled exe.
4. Open VS - Find history is empty.

Keep in mind that VS caches this Find and Replace lists. It persists the lists to the registry when you close VS. So if you clean the list and then restart VS, you will see no effect, because VS restored the list on the shutdown. So you need to close VS, clear the list, open VS.