Vscode: Add support for code extract into variable and method

Created on 2 Nov 2016 · 12Comments · Source: microsoft/vscode

This feature exist in Jet brains products and I find it very useful to refactoring your code.
Basically you :

select a piece of code
click on some short key (let's say ctrl+alt+v || ctrl+alt+m)
choose a name for the variable or method (if method choose also the scope)
replace the selected or all occurrences of the code with the variable (or method call)

Example:

var arr = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7];
for( var i = 0; i< arr.length; i++){
 var a = arr[i];
 var b = arr[i] *2;
 console.log(a,b);
}

in this case if we select arr[i]; , click ctrl+alt+v , type in 'value', we will get

var arr = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7];
for( var i = 0; i< arr.length; i++){
 var value = arr[i];
 var a = value ;
 var b = value  *2;
 console.log(a,b);
}

feature-request javascript on-testplan

Source

0xori

👍1

Most helpful comment

Not sure why this has to be closed. This more or less is the functionality you expect from the vscode, as its a code editor.

Extensions would become clumsy & not maintained properly. For this kind of functionality, this part of the app should be developed & maintained by the product owner than the community

thekalinga on 19 Jan 2017

👍34

All 12 comments

There's an extension for JS refactoring: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cmstead.jsrefactor

I don't use it myself so I can't tell how well it works, but it lists "Extract Variable" functionality in their README, so you might give it a try.

kaiwood on 2 Nov 2016

Close this first as you can archive this through extensions.

rebornix on 2 Nov 2016

👎8 😕2

Not sure why this has to be closed. This more or less is the functionality you expect from the vscode, as its a code editor.

Extensions would become clumsy & not maintained properly. For this kind of functionality, this part of the app should be developed & maintained by the product owner than the community

thekalinga on 19 Jan 2017

👍34

This was added for c# two years ago, couldn't that have been done with an extension? https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v0_7_0#_c35

AncientSwordRage on 1 Aug 2017

I have a working poc of an extension that supports "extract to method" for javascript which supports types (typescript/flow) in the created function/method.
I plan to publish it in two weeks or so.

yairhaimo on 16 Aug 2017

🎉1 👍1

@rebornix Could you reconsider your position?

I know you love extensions but I think every day developers using VSCode starts to have way too much extensions and why should we use an extension for such a basic feature?

Or maybe offer official language extensions that would at least group various features that could be enabled/disabled from a clean ui interface.