I recently discovered Incremental Search on VS2005 and it turns out I already knew it. You might too. Delimited or “regular” searching is the Microsoft default. I use it most in Internet Explorer to see if the page contains a secondary search term. It goes like this. Click Edit\Find. Type in a box. Click Find. It does or does not find the term. IE might find part of the term. Notepad is the absolute worst. All of the term matches or none does.
Firefox uses Incremental search. This is how it goes. Click Edit\Find. A bar appears across the bottom. Start typing, the window will jump around as your typing matches various words on the web page. If nothing matches, the background of the text field becomes light red. If more than one thing matches, click Find Next to go to the next one.
When I discovered this feature dissimilarity 4 years ago I freaked. It’s so much better in FF that it was half the reason for leaving IE. At this point it’s probably one third the reason. That’s a lot for one feature. It’s very frustrating to use other programs that don’t have this. I use Notepad++, because Notepad’s Find feature is so worthless. MS doesn’t seem to have updated Notepad in a decade and it was one of my most used programs.
Search: If It Isn’t Incremental, It’s Excremental
Visual Studio 2008 How to: Search a Document Incrementally