Suggestion: Improved Scopes for Inherited/Implemented/Extension Members

[fitdev]

It's very useful to limit the find symbol results for searches like Find Referrers/Overrides/Extensions to the following cases:

• Current project only (perhaps have Shift modifier for this)
• Current + Derived only
• Current type only (for generic extensions) - hugely useful as an extension may be valid at 100s of places, but I am only interested in a few of them (closed generics) that use specific this type. (obviously it would have to be invoked from the caller, as the callee is an open generic).

And so with this approach these extra modifiers could be combined to further limit the scope.

The generics would be especially useful for enums for example, as I often search for common enum extension members I defined, but I need to find their usages on a specific enum, not all the usages on an open TEnum.

Also the existing implementation of current symbol only for Find Referrers does not work properly in that it finds too many items when Ctrl is used to limit results only to the current instance:

interface INameable { string Name { get; } }
abstract class NamedEntity  : INameable { 
  public string Name { get; set; }
}
class Country : NamedEntity { }
class Person : NamedEntity { }
class Program {
  void Main() {
    var c = new Country();
    c.Name = "Country";
    var p = new Person();
    p.Name = "John"; //<-- If I hover over Name here and choose Find Referrers with Match Symbol only, it will also find c.Name (the one on Country)
  }
}

It would be great if you could prioritize this, as this search is really indispensable for large solutions when you need to update/rename/refactor certain symbols and need to understand the specific places where they are used.

[wmjordan]

There will be too many modifiers.

How about showing sub-command buttons at the menu?
You can click the buttons to get the variant commands, as the following screenshot shows.

On the above screenshot, the Copy Symbol command has two variants. Moving your mouse cursor onto them, you will get a tooltip telling you what they are for. No need to struggle with Ctrl and Shift any more, and there will not limit command variants to 3.

[fitdev]

That's awesome! Even better! I just thought modifiers would be easier to implement :)

[wmjordan]

Deepseek helped me to implement that. You will see it in the next version.

[wmjordan]

I find that some options are not mutually exclusive, and I turn those options into toggle buttons.
You can check those buttons one by one for your needs.

The good aspect is that the toggle buttons are intuitive.
The bad aspect is that it requires extra button clicks to launch the symbol search.

[fitdev]

You are absolutely right - some options are not mutually exclusive.
Your approach with toggle buttons is great! I love it! Extra click is a very small price to pay compared to what this gives you :)

[wmjordan]

Please try the new beta.

[fitdev]

I will as soon as I figure out how to get back to VS after their yesterday's Insiders Release which prevents VS from opening any solution (so do not upgrade yet to the latest Insiders version).

[fitdev]

I really like the updated experience with toggle-able modifiers! Makes it very easy to use.

However as for the actual symbol search, the current version could not find for example the open generic extension member defined on TEnum when I selected Exact match. At the very least there should be 1 match - namely the one where I invovled the menu from. But in my case there would be several matches, yet none were found.

[wmjordan]

the current version could not find for example the open generic extension member defined on TEnum when I selected Exact match

Please show me the code and let me see what's going on.

[fitdev]

public static class Extensions {

  public static string TextName<TEnum>(this TEnum it, string? fallback = null) where TEnum : unmanaged, Enum => "foo";
  
}

enum MyEnum {
 A,
 B,
}

class Program {

  void Main() {
    var a = MyEnum.A.TextName(); //<- When doing Find Referrer on `TextName`, and scoping to exact match, the result list is empty.
    var b = MyEnum.B.TextName();
    
  }

}

[wmjordan]

The "Extract Match" option is intended to limit search results within the current type, excluding inherit or base types.
The about situation is obviously a bug. I will fix it.

For your aforementioned requested limit on generics, maybe a new option "Match Type Argument" should be provided.