Suggestion: refactor to "move to another (existing) file"

[OliverJAsh]

Search Terms

Suggestion

The "move to new file" refactor is really helpful, but what if you want to move the code to an existing module?

This happens very often, when you realise code has been living in the wrong module, or it has a better home in some other module.

I would like to suggest a new refactor: "move to another (existing) file".

My workaround at the moment is to move the code manually, and then manually update all imports, but this is rather tedious!

Checklist

My suggestion meets these guidelines:

• This wouldn't be a breaking change in existing TypeScript/JavaScript code
• This wouldn't change the runtime behavior of existing JavaScript code
• This could be implemented without emitting different JS based on the types of the expressions
• This isn't a runtime feature (e.g. library functionality, non-ECMAScript syntax with JavaScript output, etc.)
• This feature would agree with the rest of TypeScript's Design Goals.

[jillesvangurp]

Yes please. This is slowing me down trying to refactor an existing code base currently. Having to manually copy paste + edit imports means I don't do this when I should be.

[rudi-c]

Use case: I work in a large Typescript codebase that does not enforce (e.g. via lint rules) anything about creating cyclic dependencies. We'd like to, but first we need to break the existing cycles! But over the years, there's one dependency cycle that has grown to include 500 files. Half of the work to break a cycle is really just moving definitions between files...so this feature would be super helpful!

I'm sure this is harder than to move to a new file since now you'd need to check for name clashes (both the thing being moved and the imports that get moved), merge imports when they already exist on the destination file, etc.

This looks kind of fun so I might take a look at it...some guidance would be appreciated though! Recommendations on approaches would be helpful. I'm sure there's a lot of other issues I didn't think of.

@Andy-MS

[jasonwilliams]

It would be nice to have this feature!
It should be similar to #23726 im guessing if someone wanted to try implementing this they could look at that PR

@RyanCavanaugh did you still need more feedback for this?

[rubenlg]

Another use case:
I'm mostly OK with "Move to a new file", but sometimes I move a bunch of symbols together and after saving and making further changes, I realize I forgot to move one symbol into that file, and have to do that manually instead.

[yhslai]

+1

IMO "Move to an existing file" is much more useful than merely creating a new file.

[jasonwilliams]

Paging @andrewbranch is this difficult to implement?

[orta]

I'm not sure of the internals, but this would probably be tricky - to my knowledge there are no refactor/fixits which require users pick a file or provide some sort of input in order for the fixit to run. You might have to make changes to the TS types and have editors accept the new format ahead of getting this in.