Improve the sorting and matching of quick pick

[kentcdodds]

Originally posted in the vscode-project-manager extension issues here. @alefragnani suggested that I file the issue here to have this applied to PickList. I'm unfamiliar with this codebase. But I think that match-sorter provides a better way to filter and sort items in a list based on user input. Could we consider adding that kind of functionality to VSCode?

Thanks!

[bpasero]

@kentcdodds is this about general sorting in all quick open things like file search, command search etc. or only for extensions that use the picker widget?

[kentcdodds]

I think that the way match-sorter works too improve the intuitiveness of lost filtering and matching is actually pretty great, so it probably makes sense for everything.

[bpasero]

Makes sense.

[alefragnani]

@bpasero, When I asked @kentcdodds to fill an issue here, I didn't remember the other issue that already existed, so it could be linked. I did another search and found, it's #14727.

Since you were looking for a better fuzzy search, I thought you could work together on this.

Hope this helps

[bpasero]

Yup, they are related. I am however currently not working on it (I unassigned myself). Sorry for the confusion.

[atombender]

Here's an example of where it goes wrong:

The file cmd/gradient/main.go is scored lower even though the text I typed matches contiguously. The top matches have matched random characters in other file names which seem to have accidentally have bumped their score up, even though the matches make less sense.

The solution is to score in a way that promotes results with a low distance between each character. Levenshtein would work here.

[kentcdodds]

Yeah, there's an issue right now for adding something like that to match-sorter here. FWIW, given that screenshot, match-sorter would have sorted things more cleanly.

[bpasero]

/duplicate #34088

[vscodebot]

This issue has been closed because it is already tracked by another issue. See also our GitHub issues to search for existing issues and our issue reporting guidelines.

Happy Coding!