{"id":20521,"date":"2018-01-17T12:15:46","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T10:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webcodegeeks.com\/?p=20521"},"modified":"2018-01-16T10:31:12","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T08:31:12","slug":"multiple-searches-vs-code-refactoring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webcodegeeks.com\/web-development\/multiple-searches-vs-code-refactoring\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing Multiple Searches in VS Code While Refactoring"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spend a lot of my time refactoring code across a very large, legacy codebase at work. Often times, I’ll do a search for something and work my way through the results over a period of days. Sometimes, something I see might lead me to do another search and a minor refactoring job which is part of the overall refactoring job. Hence, sometimes I end up with a “stack” of different searches which represents all the parts of the overall refactoring job. In each of these search results, it’s important to not “lose my place” as I go down the list.<\/p>\n

WebStorm \/ IntelliJ \/ PyCharm support this workflow really well:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nNotice, I have multiple search tabs open at the same time (which is missing from VS Code). I can cross things off the list (which you can do in VS Code via deleting the item). And I don’t lose my place in the list when I edit the code (another key benefit over VS Code).<\/p>\n

NetBeans also lets you have multiple search result tabs at the same time.<\/p>\n

It’s not built into Sublime, but there’s an extension for it called\u00a0Open Search in a New Tab<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Atom lacks this feature. Here’s the\u00a0open issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned, VS Code also lacks this feature. Here’s the\u00a0open issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think that WebStorm \/ IntelliJ \/ PyCharm support this the best, but since I really wanted to give VS Code a solid try, I needed to come up with a workaround. My previous attempts at doing large, manual refactors in VS Code were incredibly painful since I could only have one set of search results open at a time, and anytime I edited the code, I lost my place in the search results. I finally figured out that you can run ag (i.e.\u00a0The Silver Searcher<\/a>) from the command line and have it automatically open up in a new tab. (There is an extension for ag, but it doesn’t do what I want.) Here’s my workflow:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nMake sure you’ve already run the “Shell Command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH” command.<\/p>\n

Make sure you’ve already installed ag. On Mac, I use:<\/p>\n

brew install the_silver_searcher<\/code><\/p>\n

Make sure you have at least the November 2017 version of VS Code.<\/p>\n

Now, if you want to search for something, open up the terminal (which is built into VS Code) and type:<\/p>\n

ag --group search_term directory | code - &<\/code><\/p>\n

This will pop the search results into a new tab, and you can have as many tabs as you want. Since the results will be plain text, you can edit them if you’d like.<\/p>\n

This workflow certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s a good solution for me given my need for multiple search result windows that I can make my way through slowly, marking things as I go.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
Published on Web Code Geeks with permission by Shannon Behrens, partner at our WCG program<\/a>. See the original article here: Doing Multiple Searches in VS Code While Refactoring <\/a><\/p>\n

Opinions expressed by Web Code Geeks contributors are their own.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spend a lot of my time refactoring code across a very large, legacy codebase at work. Often times, I’ll do a search for something and work my way through the results over a period of days. Sometimes, something I see might lead me to do another search and a minor refactoring job which is …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2215,"featured_media":927,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[510],"class_list":["post-20521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-web-development","tag-vs-code"],"yoast_head":"\nDoing Multiple Searches in VS Code While Refactoring - Web Code Geeks - 2026<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I spend a lot of my time refactoring code across a very large, legacy codebase at work. 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