Ironic ain’t it? I can’t find my Find Dialog in Visual Studio and I can’t use find to find it. Ok funny, but at the time it didn’t seem too funny because I needed to really find something in a rather large JavaScript source file. But when pressing Ctrl-F (or Ctrl-H for Find/Replace) in Visual Studio rather than getting the familiar Find Dialog I got a slight flicker and a whole lotta nothing else.

At the time I was pretty sure that the dialog was actually there, but offscreen somehow. In fact, I was still able to press Ctrl-F type some text and hit enter and see the find operation work which is kinda freaky. The Master of Puppets at work.

Because I was in a rush, to get the window back I went to Window | Reset Window Layout and that got me back my Find Dialog. It also blew away all of my other window settings which was not so desirable.

Turns out that I sent a quick Tweet out over Twitter and several people responded with the short cut to move a window inside of the VS environment:

Alt – M  (that’s Alt minus M)

which lets you move a window with the keyboard by using the arrow keys. The process for the Find Dialog is to press Ctrl-F to activate the window then Alt – M followed by moving the arrow keys until you find the window in your work space. Hopefully the window is somewhere in a reasonable spot and not at 20,000 pixels out where a keyboard move is unlikely to work. In the worst case you can still use the full Window Reset.

I have no idea what caused my Find window to go into hiding, but given the many Twitter responses it looks like this happens from time to time. Remembering keystrokes like Alt – M is tough though, I suspect I’ll have forgotten the next time this happens. :-)