Snippet body used as description when none is provided

[dimateos]

For tiny snippets I usually end up writing the same body as the description as it provides the perfect info (plus also the uncut positional args as I mention in #181112).

This is nice because you have a tiny preview in the insert snippet menu, PLUS you also get fuzzy match agains part of the body:

With no description is hard to remember sometimes:

So it would be nice to have an option to toggle this behavior:

• Just show a preview of the snippet in the insert snippet window, like is shown in the snippet suggestion documentation popup (see images and more context in Variable substitution in snippet preview #181112)
• Actually take the body string as description whenever there is no description. Would achieve fuxxy search. Could limit to single string bodies or just concatenate big bodies, but a large body could e a problem.

[vscodenpa]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 20 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[TheSylvester]

Hi everyone! I'm a relatively new dev trying to make my first contrib to a project and this seems to be the only "good first issue" that seems easiest, so I've been trying to investigate how to work on it.

If anyone has any advice on where to start looking, I'm all ears 👂😆

[jrieken]

@TheSylvester this is your code pointer:

vscode/src/vs/workbench/contrib/snippets/browser/snippetPicker.ts

Line 39 in 193bec8

detail: snippet.description,

[TheSylvester]

Thank you! Coincidentally I was examining this exact piece when you posted the comment. I implemented the functionality requested in my own code. Now I just need to turn it into a toggleable option in prefs 😉

Now that I've finally got past the initial shock of the first large code base I've read into, I'll be looking at other PRs to examine how they added preferences and go from there. Hopefully I will have a PR soon 🤞

[TheSylvester]

I made a PR for this feature (see above). It's my first PR in open source and the first time I've worked in a large code base like this, so kindly point out anything I need to do differently and I'll be happy to make any changes 🙏