search results in a tree view

[ThomasJuhasz]

Hi guys,

I'd really like to have an option to see the search results in a tree view. When working on big JS codebases I find it difficult to see the relevant findings in this flattened list, although in many cases when the search result is small, this flattened list is easier for the eye.
BTW this search panel could be a nice extension point as well, not sure what is an easier thing to do.
I'll try to contribute sometime, but I hope someone would take this ticket soon :)

Thanks guys,
Thomas

PS.: VSCode is awesome, you are awesome, thank you.

[d-akara]

I think there are many different interesting ways the results could be represented that are useful to different people based on context of their project. I also struggle a bit on large codebases.
I recently posted some proposals in #19939
Possibly some of these ideas could be consolidated, or an extension point made so that alternative views could be provided.

[Tyriar]

I think filtering the explorer would cover this #10026

/cc @roblourens since it's related to search though.

[ThomasJuhasz]

@Tyriar I really dont think the two are the same. The feature you are suggesting is in visual studio and I cant describe how bad I hated it and it wasn't just me. It's nice to have your explorer untouched while searching in another tab. I think the duplicate tag should be taken off, it's not the same.

[Tyriar]

Ping @roblourens

[jsynowiec]

@Tyriar anything new regarding this FR? Doing an extensive refactor over a large codebase is really inconvenient without an ability to group results by folder, display a tree or any other additional way of further narrowing down search results.

[roblourens]

We are thinking about how search results will look in a multi-folder situation (#396) and how that will affect the UX, so we probably won't do anything here until then.

[seanpoulter]

Let me know if I can help @roblourens.

[oliviermartin]

I really hope this feature request is still considered. I have been using Eclipse for many years. I tried Visual Studio Code today. And I quite like it and I was considering switching to it!

... until I made a search in files of my large project. Impossible to extract a useful results from my search. Using include and exclude filter would not help me.

And I came back to eclipse. I am following this issue and would give a try again when it would be solved.

[davidwindell]

Same here, just came to see if there was a way to match Netbeans' behaviour below that allows toggling a file tree:

[seanpoulter]

I'll put it out there again -- if this something we should get going in a PR @roblourens? I've been using the editor pretty much every day for the last year and it's the only one thing I'd change in the core.

[iamandrewluca]

Does this PR relates #29964 ?

[zenyuk]

+1

[iuriimattos]

+1

[aaltaras]

any update or progress on that issue?

[sibitu]

any update or progress on that issue? This is very usefull feature. When you are looking for a sentense and you know that it should be somewhere in one directory you can easily find it using tree view.

[byyo]

+1

[imaimai86]

+1

[sebastienpa]

+1

[ryanwinter]

Ug, I hate parsing through the search list and having to look at the weird path metadata rather than just show me a tree structure.

[matanhavi]

Here is another thumb up for this feature👍
If I only know how to write extension for vsCode...

[grumBit]

I would love this feature please.

I compensate for the lack of it using egrep wrapped in a shell script with loads of exclusions, so at least the file path appears first, which makes it somewhat easier to get a sense of the directory tree. Although, it seems a bit poor when the command line is more helpful than vs code!

[welcometochristown]

I would also like this feature, web you have different projects in one repository, it can get annoying having to keep changing which files to include. A tree structure would help alot.

[jakemschiller]

+1 for this feature

[carl-lindquist]

Big upvote on this

[pdeng6]

+1 for this feature

[fm-swe]

holy shit, how can this still be missing after 5 years... back to eclipse it is

[trekhleb]

I've played around trying to implement a Search Tree extension here trekhleb/vscode-search-tree.

However, there are some challenges like:

• not being able to re-use the VSCode search API (I don't quite like the idea of introducing a custom search engine),
• extending the existing Search View instead of implementing a new one,
• etc.

So the code of the extension is pretty raw, not tested, not optimized, and not ready for publishing yet. But here is a quick demo of what I've ended up with so far:

I'm pausing the work on the extension for now, since the current issue has been picked up for consideration in #157454. Hopefully, the Tree View will be implemented in the VSCode core. But meanwhile, feel free to check the source code I've got and extend it if you want.

[grumBit]

Fantastic @andreamah ! Thank you for adding that in #161022 .

[sibitu]

Thank you :D