Highlight all occurrences of selection in all windows in Visual Studio Code

Question

I'm using Visual Studio Code with two windows (panes) side-by-side. To avoid confusion, here is a screenshot:

I'm using "editor.selectionHighlight": true, which you can see is working in the left (active) window. A similar solution is proposed in this question with editor.action.selectHighlights, but that works only in the active window. I tried searching but all my searches resulted in what I'm already using.

When I was using Atom, I was using a "Highlight Selection" plugin which highlighted matches from all open windows.

Is there a way, either native (preferred) or via an extension, to make selection highlighting work in all open windows?

Answer 1

It looks like the highlight (not select) functionality shown below will be released in Stable v1.84 early December 2023 as under this setting:

Editor: Occurrences Highlight

Controls whether occurrences should be highlighted across files.

Options:

1. off
2. singleFile - current file only
3. multiFile - across all valid open files

---

Work has begun and can be tested on this feature in the Insiders Build v1.84. The currently experimental feature will highlight the occurrences of a word found in all visible editors (in my early testing). From Test: Multi Editor/Model Highlighting

You must enable this setting:

Editor: Multi Document Occurrences Highlight

> Experimental: Controls whether the editor should highlight word
> occurrences across multiple open editors

Note

This initial implementation features only textual occurrences, with support for semantic highlighting coming in the future.

Here is a demo with three different files in three editor groups. You see you don't have to select the words, just click on them.