Add sorting to Open Editors list

[ghost]

This could be simply optional alphabetic sorting. As it stands when you have lots of files open it can be hard to match up files that are associated (e.g. circus.component.js and circus.component.html) without the tedious task of manually dragging them into order.

[pamtbaau]

And while you are at it... Please add optional sorting of Git files too...

[kzh125]

This feature is useful to find a file between many tabs.
VS can sort tabs alphabetically with the Productivity Power Tools.

Hope VSCode has this feature too...

[Ampakinetic]

Now that text selection dragging works, this is the only feature missing before VS code becomes the prefect IDE for me :)

[deathemperor]

+1

[zen0wu]

+1

[matthewvolk]

+1 :D

[nhustak]

+1

[dpetratsch]

+1

[Montago]

+1

[dgenin]

+1

[mikeoutlaw]

+1

[takafan]

+1

[benwallis]

+1

[charlesr1971]

+1

[charlesr1971]

Where are we on this feature? It was first mentioned in 2016. Why the delay?
It is not only a very useful feature, but almost indispensable.
I am somewhat puzzled why VSCode was not shipped with this feature, originally?

[Hobart2967]

+1

[mrwalruss]

+1

[two-bridges]

+1

[notalentgeek]

Is this possible to be made as a plugin? I am in need.

[cmacdonnacha]

+1

[bbahes]

+1

[LuizAsFight]

+1

[harjeethans]

+1

[iniatse]

thank you

[charles-dexter-ward]

It seems the plugin does not accomplish the requested feature.
The order of Opened Editors shoud not be automatically reflected on the order of opened Tabs (and viceversa). I think it can be very confusing for the user which does not find a specific tab where it was before. I usually associate a specific Tab with one of the siblings and moving them could be quite annoying.

[iniatse]

Better then nothing... I can choose to disable it whenever I want. I mean this issue is more then 3 years, it seems that MS does not care at all or is not able to implement it idk.

[mva123]

Well.. now we have a starting point maybe the plugin developer is willing to add more features to the plugin to accomplish the original request?

The plugin (with the full path sorting off) will work for now.

[vandwalle]

How are we on this feature? Has it somewhat been accepted and is this on a roadmap?

[jsmedmar]

Sorting by date modified could also be really useful. Use case: when you have tens of editors open and you want to close by latest modified or latest opened.

[Battlemarch]

+1

It's not always easy to get IT/Security to approve all these different plugins.
With opening 2-4 tabs for each component in Angular, this would be useful in the base VS Code.

[studgeek]

Also helpful would be grouping by directory. So it essentially would a tree view of just the open files.

[isidorn]

Hello everybody, my name is Isidor and I work on VS Code.
I am pondering about adding this feature, however this issue has 100+ comments and I did not read all of them.
My suggestion on how to solve this:

• Add a setting explorer.openEditors.sortOrder: editorOrder, alphabetical

The sorting would only be done within groups. So editors would still be split between GROUP 1 and GROUP 2...
The sorting will only have an effect on the OPEN EDITORS view. It will not "move tabs" in any way.
The default would be editorOrder and that is the current behavior. Not sure about the name though.

Bonus features:

• Consider adding button in the Open Editors title area that would toggle between this sort setting values
• Consider to add modified as a value to the sortOrder setting. Downside: Open Editors view has no dependency on fileService and currently does not do any stat calls, this would have to change then

I plan to discuss this in this weeks UX call with the rest of the team to see if my proposal makes sense.
Concise feedback is welcome here. Thank you

fyi @bpasero @misolori

[charles-dexter-ward]

@isidorn

I rewrite the (my :) ) need:

"The order of Opened Editors shoud not be reflected on the order of opened Tabs (and viceversa). I think it can be very confusing for the user which does not find a specific tab where it was before. I usually associate a specific Tab with one of the siblings and moving them could be quite annoying."

So, ordering the Open Editors for any criteria which will be decided should not rearrange tabs, and, on the other hand, rearranging the tabs should not change the order in the open editors.

[DonRhodes]

Hello everybody, my name is Isidor and I work on VS Code.

Isidor, the setting that you present sounds like what a lot of people have been looking for as a start. I can see people wanting more feature, reverse order, by extension, and other options that I am not thinking of; however the feature needs to start somewhere.

[cnanders]

@isidorn, I agree that your proposed solution is what the majority of people are looking for in v1. Thank you for your generous work on this project! On Nov 10, 2020, at 05:10, Don <[email protected]> wrote: Hello everybody, my name is Isidor and I work on VS Code. Isidor, the setting that you present sounds like what a lot of people have been looking for as a start. I can see people wanting more feature, reverse order, by extension, and other options that I am not thinking of; however the feature needs to start somewhere. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#12453 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADFKFFPIVPGUCSHFO5LRN3SPE3VPANCNFSM4CQPY2BQ>.

[coling]

Thanks @isidorn for taking on this task of improving things. Any improvement would be welcome and personally I would love to see two recently mentioned things in this ticket.

1. Sort alphabetically with the extra bonus of favouring files called 'index.*'. I'm not sure if this need to be configurable or just a built in feature of alphabetical sorting.
2. As per @studgeek's recent comment sorting based on the full tree would be my preferred option with bonus points for actually being able to show the open editors in a tree view. I think this is suitably separate from the Groups feature to mention it here. (that said, it might be more sensible to simply add a "Show open files only" toggle button to the Workspace tree view (next to 'New File', 'New folder', 'Refresh' etc.) instead which would achieve the same goal and perhaps with less code duplication. If this was possible, I'd probably not bother using the "Open Editors" view at all.

Just one more comment in the sea of this feature request! :-) Good luck.

[isidorn]

Thank you for your feedback.
As mentioned in my comment above:
I have added a setting explorer.openEditors.sortOrder: editorOrder, alphabetical
The sorting would only be done within groups. So editors would still be split between GROUP 1 and GROUP 2...

The sorting will only have an effect on the OPEN EDITORS view. It will not "move tabs" in any way.

The default would be editorOrder and that is the current behavior.

For additional asks please file new feature requests and we will consider adding those as well (for example "modified" sort).
You can try it out in VS Code insiders from Friday, so try it out and let us know what you think. Thanks!

[studgeek]

I created #114470 for sorting using the filename's full relative path as mentioned in a couple comments above.

[matkovski]

@isidorn Thanks a lot, that solves the problem, but unfortunately creates a new one. If I set explorer.openEditors.sortOrder to alphabetical the order of tabs and open editors is different - tabs are not re-sorted. Now, there are two main ways to switch between editors using a keyboard - Ctrl+Tab (go to previous or scroll through all) and (on Mac) Cmd+Shift+[ or ], and Windows would be Ctrl+Page down/up I imagine. While the setting does sort the way the editors are shown in the Open editors list, keyboard browsing still uses the original order. Also, the list that you see when pressing Ctrl+Tab uses the original order as well.

I imagine changing this behaviour or making it configurable would be a much bigger task than the quick fix you made, but it would be very helpful if we had a couple of new commands like the existing 'Open next editor' and 'Open previous editor', but which would respect this new setting.

[isidorn]

@matkovski please file a new issue and we can continue the discussion there