Apparently VS Code does not list existing files in files dropdown (Ctrl + P command).
Here is what it shows:
As you can see, the file laravel-2019-09-26.log exists in the directory (left bottom), but not in the files dropdown. After I open this file from the Explorer tree, it starts showing in the dropdown.
Am I doing something wrong or does this happen for everyone? Or is this command supposed to show previously opened files only? If so, what is the way to quickly open any existing file in the workspace?
N.B: I have gone through this related question. No one has mentioned this problem, making me think that this might be specific to my machine.
Edit
For future readers, second answer provided by #michaelze is spot on. VS Code by default does not list files mentioned in .gitignore. You can change this setting by going to Settings panel (File > Preferences > Settings) and typing useIgnoreFiles. This will bring up two boolean settings named Use Global Ignore Files and Use Ignore Files. Turn off these two settings and all workspace files will start showing in the files dropdown. Works correctly as of version 1.38.1.
As those files are .log files, I assume, they are maybe mentioned in the .gitignore file? Maybe this can help you? Visual Studio Code - Automatic exclude based on .gitignore
The list you are seing when pressing CTRL + P is called recently opened. When you open one of the files, it was recently open, so it shows up. The CTRL + P menu also has a files results section that lists actual search results from the files you have in your workspace. None of your .log files are showing up in this section (hence the section is not visible).
The laravel-2019-09-08.log file is also missing from the drop down.
I was wondering if maybe the listing is capped to a certain number of files. Try to be more specific with your search. In my version of VSCode, I can search for files using multiple words. Maybe try searching for "laravel 26" to find the file you are looking for?
Related
Within the explorer panel of VS Code itself, if I want to copy a file to another directory in the workspace, I can use ctrl+c and ctrl+v, but if I find a file from another application on my computer such as the native File Explorer application, first pressing the shortcut key ctrl+c and then going to the VS Code window and pressing the shortcut key ctrl+v in the Explorer panel, there is no effect.
Note that I'm not talking about copying the contents of the file and pasting into VS Code. I'm talking about copying "the file" as in the notion of the file to the desktop environment.
The workaround is the use the native file explorer, copy the file first, then open the folder opened in VS Code, and finally paste it within the native file explorer. But I find this so troublesome.
Is there an easier way to do this? Does VS Code support such functionality to paste files copied to the clipboard from a different application (not VS Code) and paste into VS Code? Is that functionality hidden behind a setting that I need to change? Or is this possible via an extension?
Vscode does dragging the filename from a native file explorer (at least on Windows) and dropping in vscode's Explorer where you want it.
You can also use your OS's Open With... functionality and then drag the tab of that editor into whichever directory you want.
You can choose Add File from File to add a file to your workspace. Or you can use New File from File to create a new file in your workspace and copy the content of the file outside to it.
At the time of this writing, this is not supported... yet!
Work to implement this is tracked under this GitHub issue: Explorer: allow to paste files from the clipboard into target folder #130036, which is a subtask of a larger issue tracking a larger effort for Better drag and drop / clipboard integration of files across applications #164.
You can give a thumbs up reaction on those issue pages to increase their prioritization (but please don't leave "me too" comments there, as such comments are considered annoying noise).
pingren (a contributor to the VS Code repository) tried to implement this and found it to be more complicated than it looks. You can read their explanation of why in their comment there. One of the difficulties stems from itegration with system keybindings and VS Code's affordance for remapping keys:
the onPaste event could only be triggered by system paste (cmd+V on macOS). Users could change filesExplorer.paste command to any keybindings. So we need to consider how to merge native paste from clipboard and VSCode explorer paste.
There's another feature-request issue (Copy paste files from native explorer to vscode #89862, created before #130036) where isidorn (another VS Code contributor) commented:
This is a fair feature request however I believe there is a Chrome limtation which is preventing us from achieving this. [...]
As for extensions that might do this, I don't know of any (but haven't tried searching intently).
Other possible workarounds:
Try dragging the file from your native file explorer application to the VS Code file explorer panel. This is confirmed to work at least on Windows and Ubuntu.
From Mark's answer (copied under CC-BY-SA):
You can also use your OS's Open With... functionality and then drag the tab of that editor into whichever directory you want.
From user103's answer (copied under CC-BY-SA), and partially mentioned in the question post already:
You can choose Add File from File to add a file to your workspace. Or you can use New File from File to create a new file in your workspace and copy the content of the file outside to it.
My workflow with VS Code is to always use project folders on projects. This works great, but there's one thing that's messing things up right now;
When opening just a single file from another project while working in another project, lets's say webpack.config.js, I use Windows Explorer rightclick to open that file in VS Code. However, this always opens the file in the currently open VS Code instance.
This adds the file from that other folder now to the memory of the previously opened files in the open project while it has nothing to do with that project.
When using the quick file open of VS Code now it happens a lot VS Code opens a file from that other folder, only because that outside file has been opened once while I was working on this project.
This is error prone as now it happens a lot, especially when working fast, that the wrong, for instance, package.json or webpack.config.js file gets opened, because VS Code now also suggests files that are outside this project. That's pretty frustrating and causes changes to be made in the wrong files pretty quickly.
I know we can clear the editor history and have to do it a lot now. But to me that's the other way around, doesn't solve the real problem and when not done often the issue remains.
So I want to get rid of this issue and have the following questions:
1) How can we change the 'Open with Code' rightclick menuitem in Explorer to open files always in a new instance of VS Code?
2) Is there a config settings to disable the behaviour that VS Code remembers files that are outside of the current work folder?
Thanks in advance, this thing is bothering me for quite some time now!
How can we change the 'Open with Code' rightclick menuitem in Explorer to open files always in a new instance of VS Code?
I assume you are a Windows user. You can edit the context menu behavior from Regedit.
Follow the below steps:
Press Windows + R
Type regedit and press OK
Go to Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\VSCode\command in regedit
Add -n parameter to the command like below
It will help you to open every file in a new window when you use Open with Code.
For your second question, Is there a config settings to disable the behavior that VS Code remembers files that are outside of the current work folder?
Open VS Code settings
Search window.openFilesInNewWindow
Make it off to on like below
With this configuration, you can't open new files in the current workspace therefore technically you prevent VS Code remember outside files. Not directly but it helps.
I don't like how "recently opened" files are shown in VS Code Quick Open (Ctrl+P). I think OP is describing this behavior...
The behavior to remember "recently opened" files causes me problems when I mistakenly open a temporary/copy of my file, i.e.
C:/users/temp/code.js
... instead of the true file (i.e. located inside the currently-open VS Code project)
C:/git/source-control/code.js
...my confusion happens because because both files are listed among the options when I use Quick Open Ctrl+P and type "code"
For me , the Quick Open list also has the answer, any "recently-open" files should have an "X" icon on the right side. You may need to hover your mouse over the file you want to remove.
Click the "X" icon to "Remove from recently open". Quick Open will always be able to find files in your current project, even if you remove them from recently-open:
Please note I don't have access to regedit as suggested in the accepted answer; my answer here does not require regedit
I'm using the workspace feature of VSCode, with two projects, but it's annoying to search for a file in the front-end project and need to pass by back-end files to find the one I want.
I'm using ctrl + p to search for files.
How can I search for a file in just one folder with multiple projects opened in the workspace?
Yes thats possible: use a relative path: ./mySearchedProjectName in "files to include"-input
from HERE!
UPDATED answer to UPDATED question
The fuzzy file finder (CTRL+P or ⌘+P) somehow supports prefixing the filename with a folder, such as folder/filename to locate a file from a specific folder:
But, in my experience, the search is a bit lacking. For example, I find it usually can only find files this way if that file has been recently opened in your workspace. It also does not support regex.
The best thing that can be done is to enable including recently opened files by adding this to the workspace settings:
"settings": {
"search.quickOpen.includeHistory": true,
AFAIK, there is no other built-in way to filter the results. There are (still) open feature requests for this, like this Allow quick open to filter on folder names by typing folder name after the file. You can thumbs-up them to hopefully get them noticed.
ORIGINAL answer to ORIGINAL question
I don't know what you mean by "projects" since VS Code only has "workspaces" and "folders", such that you add folders to a workspace. I think you're already doing this, where each folder contains a separate set of codes.
With that said, the Search/Find panel has an area to specify files to include, where you can limit your search to a specific folder. For example:
Here I have 3 folders (proj 1-3) added to a workspace. I have 3 sample files with the same text.
When searching, you can set files to include to a specific folder (./proj2), so that the search results will be limited to that folder.
I've found the best solution to this for me (though it's still a sub-optimal one) is simply to run multiple VS Code instances, one for each folder.
It's a pain to start up, but once you get things going (and hopefully you're not restarting often on your dev machine, so this is less of an issue) it works perfectly: you can search for files with only the relevant ones showing up.
Also, if you want to reduce the start-up pain you can make a shortcut/alias/etc. in your operating system that starts both at once.
I am using Visual Studio Code 1.31.1 in MacOS 10.13.6. I open VSCode, I open a folder of text files, and I press command-option-F, or use Edit -> Find in Files. I search for a string that I know for sure exists in multiple text files in the open folder, and it says it can't find it.
Searching across files works if I have the folder open and have each and every single file open as a tab, which is rather pointless. Is there a way to search across files without actually having them all open as tabs?
I think it was because I opened a folder on Google Drive File Stream. It works fine on local files.
In my case, this was caused by me accidentally toggling the "Search only in Open Editors" option.
Had this same issue, the search functionality was only working for files that were open in the editor. My issue was that VS Code had an update downloaded and ready to update, so I just restarted VS Code, let the update finish and the issue was gone.
It could be that the search is looking into all folders (including node_modules ones), so as it is too big, the search never ends
To fix that, you can list all folders that you want to exclude of the search, to do that, open your vscode settings (ctrl + ,) type "Search: Exclude" in the search box and add your folders. (Btw some are already added by default)
Besides, remember to enable that filter in your search, this is simple, just toggle on the gear button in your search section
If you are still not sure about what to do, take a look in this briefly gif
Had the same issue on Mac, seems like it was related to Google Drive. once I moved the files on my local drive the search worked fine.
Check out your vs code settings. It excludes some folders by default e.g. node modules.
Go to settings, search "Search" , there will be list to exclude folders.
Remove item which might be accidentally got included, which might causing search item in all directory is not working.
I had this problem today. Turns out I had a deprecated setting for advanced RegEx searches "search.usePCRE2": true, Once removed, search started working as expected.
I just had this problem on VS Code 1.58.2 / Mac OS 10.15.7
None of the above solutions worked for me, it still keeps saying 'No results found in open editors' no matter what I do.
But I did get it working by changing the 'Search: Mode' in the settings (for the workspace, or any other scope if needed) from 'view' to 'reuseEditor'.
Yes, this doesn't fix it if you really want the results in the Explorer tab rather than a completely new editor window, but it works.
I had the same issue, i fixed mine by removing files in .gitignore
I had an issue with searching in a project with git submodules and found that the gitlens add-on defaults to ignore searching any submodules:
Setting this to 2 or more may address your problem.
In my case, I had somehow gotten my Explorer set on a subfolder of my project. Closing VS Code and reopening the workspace reset everything and search worked again.
In my case, it was files with no extensions I was not able to find. Once I added those files an extension, I was able to find them via the search feature.
I initially wrote this answer describing a confusing "inverted" behavior of the Search only in Open Editors option/button.
However, after playing around it turns out that what the GUI was showing was not "in sync" with what the search results were returning. Toggling the options a few times appears to have fixed things.
So if your search doesn't appear to be returning any results, I would suggest toggling the Search only in Open Editors and Use Exclude Settings and Ignored Files options.
Otherwise, for information, here is my previous answer:
VS Code has an extremely confusing "inverted" interface when it comes to the option Search only in Open Editors.
There is also another option which affects how search works in a confusing way: Use Exclude Settings and Ignored Files.
The below screenshot shows both:
Note that:
Search only in Open Editors is OFF
Use Exclude Settings and Ignored Files is ON
With these options I get search results back, with them set the other way around - confusingly - I get nothing.
Important to note:
If you turn Use Exclude Settings and Ignored Files OFF, then VS Code seems to stop searching any files, EXCEPT for those which are currently open in tabs. This is very confusing and not the behavior one would expect. The expected behavior would probably be to search the whole opened Folder/Workspace by default.
If you turn Search only in Open Editors OFF, then only open editors will be searched. This is the "inverted" behavior. My current build of VS Code has the indicator "inverted" for this GUI element. When it looks like it is in the "ON" state, it is actually "OFF". When it looks like it is in the "OFF" state, it is actually "ON'.
These two things interact in unexpected ways: (This is the behaviour I observed after toggling both buttons a few times. It is different to what I was seeing a few minutes ago.)
Open Editors (looks like) it is OFF, Use Exclude Settings (looks like) it is ON, search appears to search whole workspace.
Open Editors (looks like) it is OFF, Use Exclude Settings (looks like) it is OFF, search appears to search open tabs only.
Open Editors (looks like) it is ON, Use Exclude Settings (looks like) it is OFF, search appears to search whole workspace.
Open Editors (looks like) it is ON, Use Exclude Settings (looks like) it is ON, search appears to search whole workspace.
I suspect that when typing / editing the search terms, replace option, and files to include/exclude options, VS Code does not check the state of the option buttons before performing the search. This is likely the source of the bug I was seeing earlier.
When i press Ctrl+Shift+R to open the Open Resource Dialog box, the filter box does not show most of the other resource files for example.. jsp, xml etc. it works fine with all the java files.. This is happening for only this particular java project. i have refreshed the project multiple times but still no-go. I have also rebuilt the index for eclipse under workspace/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.core by deleting the index files but to no avail.
I am using eclipse Kepler version. Any help would be great..
Thanks All. Yes i had closed and opened the project many times. I have also not set any Resource filter exclusions. What i noticed was that opening any of these files for edit would set off an alert saying file was derived and would i like to edit? But on the properties for these file they were not ticked as derived but rather as Archived. So had to manually hunt for the parent folder which was making these files as derived. Also noticed that the Open Resource Dialog box has option for including Resource files "Show Derived Resources"...
This one helped me solve the problem
Eclipse treating all the files in a project as Derived
This is going to sound ridiculous...but maybe this'll help others too: make sure your file search string is correct! You may need to begin it with a wildcard (*).
I lost about 45 minutes on this as the result of user error.
I was looking for some local files named eRCaGuy_PPM_Writer.h and eRCaGuy_PPM_Writer.cpp (from my repo here). So, I pressed Ctrl + Shift + R and searched for ppm_writer, as shown here:
Nothing! It would not find those files! No matter what I did to the files it couldn't seem to find them. I tried all sorts of things. Then, I realized Eclipse doesn't have a fancy fuzzy search like Sublime Text 3, so I simply added an asterisk (*) to the front of the search, and voila! It works perfectly. Since the "PPM_Writer" part of those two file names is NOT at the beginning, I must start the search with a wildcard (*).
Now it works fine, as you can see here:
I've just added a note about this to my personal Eclipse setup and configuration instructions here: https://github.com/ElectricRCAircraftGuy/eRCaGuy_dotfiles/tree/master/eclipse (for my full documentation, see also the PDF and Google Drive links at the top of that page).