How to force Solution Explorer to return to its previous state after clearing the search?

Question

I currently have a VS installation without extensions to see how this works. For navigation, this means using Ctrl+; aka Search Solution Explorer . Although the search itself is okay, it has one major drawback for me, which makes it a pain for me (with both the keyboard and the mouse):

A solution with two projects, one collapsed, one opened:

Use Ctrl+; and start typing until a match is found from the minimized project

Now I just want to clear the search and return to the previous view. This seems like a pretty standard requirement, no? But it seems that there is no such functionality. The problem with the current teams that are approaching (pressing the Esc button, pressing the Back or Home buttons in the Solution Explorer toolbar) is the same: they have extremely annoying behavior that they insist on unexpected deployment of a previously minimized project and keep track of the match found! (Btw parameter Track Active Item in Solution Explorer included in the options). Does this make no sense in terms of UX? You select some “cancel” command, the search box is cleared, which is expected, but then suddenly an element appears that is visible from the previous search:

So, if a minimized project has 50 elements in it, the solution developer is now useless visually, since he puts a screen with things that you don’t want to see, and, even worse, you have to manually collapse the project again to return to the previous view .

Is there any way around this? I thought that maybe the keyboard shortcuts for Back / Home will be different, but the commands do not seem to be registered. I looked at EnvDTE80.DTE2.ToolWindows.SolutionExplorer , but it does not have properties / methods that have anything to do with this problem. And somewhere in the tree there is Microsoft.VisualStudio.PlatformUI.SolutionPivotNavigator , which is probably the class responsible for this behavior, but I have no idea how to access it?

Answer 1

Recently updated to VS2013 SP3, and I got the impression that there were changes (or I did not notice it before, although my question says otherwise): if I use the Back button in the Solution Explorer view, it correctly returns me to the previous view, not expanding anything that has not been expanded before. Using Esc or clearing the search box still behaves the same, which is explicit, but at least if I remember to use only the back button, it will work.

update Not quite the answer, but since I started using Edit.NavigateTo (which is basically "Go to Anything", including characters / files) tied to a keyboard shortcut, I have not found a reason to use Window. SolutionExplorerSearch more.