posit-dev / posit-dev/positron

Make "Go to Symbol in Workspace" more discoverable

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area: core
Dominant language
TypeScript
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

We've had a lot of people ask about an equivalent to RStudio's Cmd + .. There is no direct equivalent in VS Code; in VS Code you can get a fuzzy finder that looks for files (Cmd + P) or workspace symbols (Cmd + T) but not both.

It might be okay for RStudio users to need to learn that they need to specify whether they are looking for a file or a function, except that it's very difficult to find the Cmd + T binding! If you click the Search bar it isn't even mentioned:

image

It's buried beneath the Help option; if you click or type ?, it's in the extended list of commands:

image

We should make it easier to find the keybinding; at the very least we could add it to the front-page list of keybindings.

(It also feels like it'd be useful to build a finder that merges files and workspace symbols, as there are unlikely to be an overwhelming number of them in most data science projects, but that'd be significantly more expensive so we'd need more evidence it'd be helpful)

See also #669 for a discussion on Cmd + .

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the Search bar and Help keybinding list shown in the issue, then locate the front-page keybinding list in the Positron interface. Make the Cmd+T workspace-symbol command easier to discover, and verify that the keybinding appears where users look for search commands.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript, vscode
Domain
developer-experience, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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