Well, it should have been, but I forgot to commit the ICSharpCode.SharpDevelop.addin file, which defines the majority of SharpDevelop's menu items, so the incremental search menu items and shortcuts were unavailable. It should be working in revision 1780. Thanks for letting me know.

Currently the Ctrl+I shortcut is being used for Indent (Edit | Formatting | Indent), which is used to fix the indentation of your source code. I picked a shortcut that was free and where I could use the Shift key as well without any conflicts. I'd like it to be Ctrl+I and Ctrl+Shift+I so it matches Visual Studio however I need agreement from the rest of the SharpDevelop team before I do this. So the shortcuts may possibly change in the future. Actually Delphi 2006 uses Ctrl+E for its Incremental Find.

The case sensitivity of Visual Studio's incremental search depends on the "Match case" option in the Find dialog. In SharpDevelop it's always case insensitive and not tied to this option in the Search and Replace dialog. If we decide to support case sensitive incremental searches, I am not sure I like the idea of doing it this way since the Search dialog is never used and not required for incremental searches. I can see some people wondering why their search is not finding any matches due to the Match case option being selected.

Incremental search in other applications:

Firefox allows you to do case sensitive searches, it has a sort of status bar that pops up at the bottom of the window, here you can click select a Match case option.

Matlab allows does case insensitive incremental searches if you type your search string in lower case. If you use upper case characters it does a case sensitive search. This might be a good way to implement case sensitivity, or perhaps do a case sensitive search if the search string contains mixed case characters.

Emacs has similar behaviour to Matlab, if you type in an upper case character the search is case sensitive. However Emacs also allows you to toggle the case sensitivity of the current incremental search via a keyboard shortcut.

Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA also do a case sensitive search if any character is a capital letter like Emacs. It also allows you to navigate to the next/previous match using the up/down keys. That might be a nice feature. However you could use Quick Find (Ctrl+F3) instead. uses the same capital letter trick to determine whether the search is case sensitive.

So I'm nearly convinced to implement case sensitive incremental searches the Eclipse/IntelliJ/Emacs/Matlab way.

Just updated the code so that you can do case sensitive incremental searches. If all the characters of the search text are lower case the search will be case insensitive. If any character is upper case the search will be case sensitive.

At the moment you cannot do this. The example you show would hopefully be fairly unusual. You could use Quick Find to move to the next match in the document. There's no reverse Quick Find so you can't go to the previous match.

I am considering allowing you to move to the next/previous match using the down/up arrows. This would allow you to find the text in your example, at least eventually.

Another possibility is a shortcut to toggle the case sensitivity, like Emacs. The status bar would need to tell you that you're doing a case sensitive search. I am not totally convinced this is a good way to do it. I actually think some sort way of moving to the next/previous match might be used more.

I want to keep the UI simple and not overcomplicate it just to handle unusual special cases. If the functionality covers a large percentage of the possible searches people will do then I think that is good enough.

I was planning on using the up/down arrows to move to the next/previous match, similar to Eclipse. It should be fairly trivial to define the actual keys used in the .addin file. I think the majority, if not all, of the keyboard shortcuts for SharpDevelop are defined in the various .addin files. So you can certainly modify these, at least by hand.

Hopefully at some point SharpDevelop will allow the user to redefine all the keyboard shortcuts from inside the IDE itself. Support for chorded keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl+W, E) is a separate problem which would need to be addressed.