Improve ranking of elements in quick open

[bpasero]

Numerous issues have been filed on this topic, merging them into one:

File Picker

• Allow to paste a file path with symbol to go to symbol in file #123809
• Allow to paste a file path with line number to go to line in file #123810
• vscode ctrl+p show matched string: shows files but not able to see matched strings when file paths are long #123383
• search files by name imperfect tokenization #116021
• Keep order stable independent for how search is formed #123382
• Opening files via relative paths containing parent directory, ".." #113322
• Incorrect prioritization of filename suggestions in quick open dialog (Ctrl+P) #170353
• Improve sorting of files in quick open #27028
• Improved search in "Go to file" panel #25925
• Quick open file order does not make sense as designed #92282
• Prioritize filetypes containing code in Quick open / Go to file #49853
• Quick Open strange highlighting #56667
• Provide an option to disable fuzzy matching in file picker #2705
• Add a setting to disable fuzzy matching in quick open #99171
• Search for files should prefer findings in one piece #69648
• index.js index.ts file should show at top of file picker when searching for the name of the directory #72514
• Unexpected order of fuzzy find results with many consecutive matches #103889
• Restrict quick open file to project files #19762
• Bump quickOpen suggestions from current workspace to the top #38128
• Sort workspace results over out of workspace results #116551
• Sort results in "Go to file" by how close they are to the working file (usability) #5806
• Rank exact match over history matches #106786
• Allow to sort files alphabetical if score is identical #149780
• Allow additional fuzzy search within files found via CTRL+P #39542
• Go to file: prefix with / to prefer results in root #81250
• Allow quick open to filter on folder names by typing folder name after the file #30404
• Scorer is not very good for matching on filenames #12095
• Sort order for file quickopen should prefer shorter paths #17443
• Quick open highlight should match consecutive characters better #21019
• Improve quick find algorithm to prioritize exact matches better #26649
• QuickOpen (Ctrl+P) search matching logic needs to be improved #33247
• How to locate one of several files of the same name #32918
• File list order not correct in go to file #34210
• fuzzy searching problem #36119
• Fuzzy search results are not prioritized well. #36166

Command Palette

• Unable to search the command palette with special characters #118469
• Command Palette - Match Commands by ID #113165
• Command palette should rank results with closer search terms higher #14727
• Add fuzzy search to commands in palette #1964
• Adaptive abbreviation search for quick open commands #17697
• Command Palette should be filterable/customized by user-settings #38841
• Adjacent characters are given a lower rank in command palette than distant #40044
• Improve Command Palette search experience for word permutations #99685
• Favorite Commands #101616
• Command Palette search with + character (like "C++") doesn't behave as expected #123915
• Quick commands fuzzy search doesn't work for text in brackets #27636

Picker (extensions)

• Support custom QuickPick filter logic #90521
• Ability to apply a final sort to QuickPick results #63050
• Enable fuzzy matching for picker #34088
• Broken fuzzy search highlighting/ranking for trimable strings #62918

Editor History

• Allow for camel case matches in editor history #108446
• Fuzzy search also in editor history #100590
• Sort recently opened files by recency after I start typing #35610
• Allow disable of recent history in "go to file" command #30770
• Quick open changes order for matching elements #10690
• Unintuitive result scoring with Ctrl-P in recent history #20546
• Recently opened files is just a bucket and not sorted by recency #31591

Symbols

• Allow extensions to fully control workspace symbol search (matching and highlights) #98125
• Allow fzf style query in workspaceSymbols #106788
• Add fuzzy search to search by symbol #33746
• Lift the 60 chars limit on the camel case matcher #43338
• Allow fuzzy result on searching symbol in file #62435
• Allow to configure that "Go to symbols" sorts symbols by fuzzy match #69062
• Improve ordering of "Go to symbol in workspace" results #71951

[kumarharsh]

+1. With bigger projects, many files start getting similar names and searching for them via Ctrl+P becomes more and more tedious to the point that I find myself just using my mouse to hunt for files in the Explorer tree.

[d-akara]

I think there are a lot of issues here that might be interesting to look at in relation to the capabilities offered by this plugin built for Eclipse.
https://github.com/dakaraphi/eclipse-plugin-commander

• Basically it is a more advanced sublime like command palette interface.
• I am the author of the Eclipse plugin and would like to build an extension for VS Code with these capabilities. Although, I don't believe that is currently possible with current exposed VS Code API's

@bpasero would you be interested in making any of the features of the above plugin available to VS Code either by exposing API's to make it possible or adoption internally?

[imdadahad]

Any news on #33746, it's one of the few things that's stopping me from switching over from Sublime 😬 @bpasero

[keegancsmith]

I based a repo and file picker off the stringscore algorithm used in vscode, and ran into the same problems around poor ranking. What I did to solve this was reward items which are better "aligned" with the query. VSCode somewhat does this now in some places via sorting matches on the filename higher than just matches on the path, but that approach falls down when you have a query like workbench repo.ts since it has to fallback to the stringscore algorithm on the full path.

The algorithm I ended using you can think of somewhat like the stringscore algorithm right now, except it works from the end of the string, and works on the string split up by the path separator. I can implement this in vscode if there is interest. Here is the algorithm which I wrote (in Go, stringscore.Score is a port of the vscode algorithm, which is based off string_score)

// postfixFuzzyAlignScore is used to calculate how well a targets component
// matches a query from the back. It rewards consecutive alignment as well as
// aligning to the right. For example for the query "a/b" we get the
// following ranking:
//
//   /a/b == /x/a/b
//   /a/b/x
//   /a/x/b
//
// The following will get zero score
//
//   /x/b
//   /ab/
func postfixFuzzyAlignScore(targetParts, queryParts []string) int {
	total := 0
	consecutive := true
	queryIdx := len(queryParts) - 1
	for targetIdx := len(targetParts) - 1; targetIdx >= 0 && queryIdx >= 0; targetIdx-- {
		score := stringscore.Score(targetParts[targetIdx], queryParts[queryIdx])
		if score <= 0 {
			consecutive = false
			continue
		}
		// Consecutive and align bonus
		if consecutive {
			score *= 2
		}
		consecutive = true
		total += score
		queryIdx--
	}
	// Did not match whole of queryIdx
	if queryIdx >= 0 {
		return 0
	}
	return total
}

[WickyNilliams]

I'd like to add a suggestion to improve search: give more weight to capital letters. I believe sublime does this.

It's super handy when your files are named with PascalCase. Example, I have two files: MetaEditor.js and Menu.js. If i were to quick open with string "ME", I'd prefer MetaEditor to have a greater weight than Menu. This may be a bad example, because I'm not sure how much length is taken into account, but hopefully it illustrates the feature.

Shall i create a separate issue referencing this, or is it enough to leave this comment here?