Hawkeye Search

We have now also got around to build a Visual Studio 2022 extension for Hawkeye and we are hoping that together with you make it the best experience for you to work with.

Regardless of experience or field you will be helped by using Hawkeye Search in you everyday workflow, get the overview, speed and instant feedback on your queries in both small and big projects.

Latest upload has automatic dark & blue support based on your selection inside Visual Studio.

2025-04-13

• Support added for showing options inside Visual Studio options pages.
• Fixed an issue with the scrollbar hiding a some groups in the find files window.
• Updated icons on the toolbar.
• Allow to specify the minimum number of hits before the search returns in options menu.
• Allow to specify the time before the search kicks in(milliseconds).

Productivity tool for all languages

Hawkeye Search allows any developer to search and find "Results" for the wanted query. In files that you have inside Visual Studio but also in other repositories and files types depending on your setup. Also including Word and Excel.

Step 1 - Download Hawkeye Search from marketplace to install the extension into Microsoft Visual Studio 2022.

Setup

After Installing the visual studio extension and enabling it inside View->Other Windows->Hawkeye you will be presented with this.

Step 2 - Click on "Connect to Hawkeye". A dialog will popup explaining to download the back-end from the site. If you already have the back-end installed and setup double check that you have version 0.9.5(Help->About Hawkeye) otherwise install it and go to Step 9.

Step 3 - Install Hawkeye-0.9.5-win64-Installer.exe you can choose to not install the Visual Studio Add-in from the installation dialog. After Install you will be presented with an empty back-end. Click on "Start Trial" to start your 30 day trial. To continue after trial has expired contact us for a license.

Step 4 - Press connect to Hawkeye. It will say that you do not have any groups added yet which is fine. We are now connected but we need to add "Groups" for Hawkeye back-end that it uses for searching, If you want to search inside the files that exist inside your visual studio solution. Please click on "Generate groups from solution"

Step 5 - Select the wanted "Groups", "Folder Locations" and "Types"(Filters) - Press "Generate" when you are done.

This will add it into the back-end with the settings you specified and load the groups inside the Visual Studio Add-in. Now the back-end will look like this.

Step 6 - You should see the same "Groups" in the Visual Studio Add-in as in the back-end. If you do not please press "Load Groups" in the front-end.

Step 7 - If you want to know more about how the back-end works and can be used detached from Visual Studio feel free to watch this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1J-G36QSwI

Step 8 - If you want a tutorial video on how to do the above steps installing the Visual Studio Add-in just watch this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csil7doLYgQ

Step 9 - Information.

Overview

1. Select/Deselect a "Group" by clicking on it to Enable/Disable it from the search, allowing you to search inside large projects without losing the possibility for overview.
2. Use Tabs to keep track of previous and current searches to track flows or just general finds.
3. Click on a "Result" with mouse or step down with keyboard down and pressing return. This will open the right file on the right line inside the editing window.

Searches

Filtering can be done on searches. In the image we add dash to exclude user and table. We also add .cs to only include .cs files. We can also flip this with adding -.cs to exclude .cs files.

The full set of commands can be found here.

Right click commands inside Visual Studio

1. Search For - Searches for the selected text inside the Hawkeye Search vs add-ins current tab. In this case dsMeeting
2. Search For In New Tab - Same as above but in a new tab. Shortcut can be bound inside Environment->Keyboard.
3. Focus On Hawkeye - Give focus to the add-in. To not need to move the mouse.
4. Find Files - Open the "Find Files" dialog.
5. Open Linked File - Open the corresponding file match. For instance the .h file to the .cpp file if there is one.
6. Search In Hawkeye External Window - This will open up the database window and do the search there in case you want a full window overview of your current search.

Find Files

1. Shows how many matches and the total number of files we have loaded in the database.
2. Similar search to the regular Hawkeye Search window. Search for a file and add filters wanted. Here we remove any files that has .xs in them. For instance .xsc, xsd, xss etc.
3. If we click the file it will be opened inside Visual Studio.