Improve ordering of "Go to symbol in workspace" results

[olafurpg]

Currently, workspace/symbol results are sometimes sorted in alphabetical order making it difficult to navigate to certain symbols

I expected "CompletionSuite", which is at the bottom in the screenshot, to appear at the top because

• it's the shortest result
• it has a shared prefix "Compl" with the query "ComplSuite"

In this particular case, the language server (Metals, https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=scalameta.metals) returns "CompletionSuite" at the top of the results.

It would be nice if Visual Studio Code could either

• improve the default ordering of items, or
• introduce some option like "editor.workspaceSymbolOrdering": "default" | "language-server" to preserve the ordering from the language server

[olafurpg]

Another example where the default ordering could be improved

I expected WorkspaceSymbolProvider to appear above TestingWorkspaceSymbolProvider. Also, I expected the uppercase S and P to be highlighted instead of lowercase sp.

[jrieken]

This actually already happened

[olafurpg]

A recent release of VS Code seems to have regressed in the ordering of workspace/symbol results

I expected the Add ; to search library dependencies to appear at the bottom of the list, which is how the ordering used to be in a previous release. The language server returned the following results

[Trace - 11:00:11 AM] Sending response 'workspace/symbol - (14004)'. Processing request took 2ms
Result: [
  {
    "name": "MetalsLanguageServer",
    "kind": 5,
    "location": {
      "uri": "file:///Users/lgeirsson/dev/metals/metals/src/main/scala/scala/meta/internal/metals/MetalsLanguageServer.scala",
      "range": {
        "start": {
          "line": 53,
          "character": 6
        },
        "end": {
          "line": 53,
          "character": 26
        }
      }
    },
    "containerName": "scala.meta.internal.metals."
  },
  {
    "name": "Add \u0027;\u0027 to search library dependencies",
    "kind": 24,
    "location": {
      "uri": "file:///Users/lgeirsson/dev/metals/.metals/workspace-symbol.md",
      "range": {
        "start": {
          "line": 0,
          "character": 0
        },
        "end": {
          "line": 0,
          "character": 0
        }
      }
    }
  }
]

Could it be that the uri is used for sorting in this situation? I would expect that it weighs more that the "LangSer" matches more closely "MetalsLanguageServer".

PS. I admit the Add ; to search library dependencies result is a hack 😅 It's a workaround to try and support a similar feature in IntelliJ.