Quick Open is a must-have feature in any IDE, but in Visual Studio Code (by default bound to cmd+e on Mac) it seems to be very slow in finding anything. Is there any configuration option/trick to make it faster by indexing files etc.?
We plan to add indexing in future updates. Until then you can configure to exclude more folders from searches. The setting is called search.exclude and allows to set patterns.
Btw quick open learns about files you open often and keeps those in a MRU list. Quick open should be fast for those files.
This extension might be useful for opening files faster:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/astral-keks.folder-indexing
It allows user to navigate to any file in workspace by just typing part of its name in editbox opened by workbench.action.showAllSymbols (Go To Symbol In Workspace) command.
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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 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.
I am exploring vscode after using atom for a long while. One of the things I'm missing is an equivalent of the lovely package advanced-open-file. Is there something similar to this in vscode?
I found the advanced-new-file extension, but it is only helpful when it comes to new files. I would like to be able to quickly open files from all over my local files (not only the workspace).
Edit: I found the option of workbench.action.quickOpen; but it doesn't allow opening files from the whole file system.
Sorry, but currently the answer is no. The problem is that input box doesn't provide a way to listen to key events:
GitHub issue,
so even the extensions can't do that currently. Here's the comment from advanced-new-file extension creator:
Because VSCode extensions don't yet have the ability to do type-ahead autocomplete within the text input box (See https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/426), we work around this limitation and provide autocomplete using a two-step workflow of selecting existing path, then providing new filename/path relative to the selection.
The good news is that there is a new API addressing this issue, but it's currently in 'proposed' state and can't be used for published extensions.
One workaround could be typing code -r some/path in integrated terminal and using 'tab' for autocomplete.
The Fuzzy search extension seems to work for me.
It adds a new action to the command palette which allows you to search for files in the current project and open them.
Simple question: how do I search all the files currently open in Eclipse? Note: I don't wanna search all the files I have in that workspace, just the ones open in tabs. Is there an easy way to do this?
Closest way is selecting several resources in Navigator or Package Explorer view, then press Ctrl+H and choose 'Selected Resources' radio button. It will limit search only to selected files.
CTRL+E on Windows or Linux, and Command+E on OSX.
There's no way to do that at the moment.
The easiest solution would be to select your files manually (holding CTRL + click on file) and to specify "selected resources" as your search scope.
This may come too late for the original poster, but just in case somebody else needs to find out an answer, I had the same problem and found my solution by installing a plug-in named Instasearch. You can get it by going to Help/Eclipse Marketplace and searching for Instasearch.
You can find more about this plug-in in the following address.
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/instasearch
Spring produces a stand-alone Eclipse plugin (no dependencies on Spring) called Quick Search
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/quick-search-eclipse
For efficiency, it searches your open files first. So while it isn't purely restricting to opened files as you requested, you can still get a similar effect in practice by just clicking the first results that come up.
The currently opened files simply aren't considered special in eclipse - you have far more advanced methods of organizing your files: projects and working sets.
Working sets allow you to define sets of files, which can be used as constraints for many operations. You have to define them explicitly, but then they don't change just because you've closed a file.
There is no find-in-open-files command in Eclipse, no.
I think that the main reason find-in-open-files is not implemented in Eclipse is probably because the set of open files is for many users rather insignificant. (In fact, I don't know (or care) which files I have open. (I even have Eclipse set to automatically close editors/files when they become too many). If I want to navigate to a file, I open it. Limiting a search to the files I currently have open would be completely pointless for me.)