Revisit contiguous matches

I’ve added the “quotes” support in #131292 and am planning on it releasing in stable as “experimental” because I’m not fully convinced it’s the correct UI to do this. I want to try 2 other options:

• a toggle button. We have these all over the place in VS Code (like in search and the find widgets). I want to experiment having one of those toggles for toggling between fuzzy and non-fuzzy search. This means we could have a toggle button for other things.
• (maybe) a different Quick Access provider since that would allow the new syntax to be in the ? menu.

[alefragnani]

Would be good to collect these cases, it is always useful to have a collection of less than ideal ranking so that we can understand why that is and if we make a fix see if our test cases are still good

Totally agree, I’ll try to replicate/identify those cases and if don’t find an already open issue to add comments, I’ll add create a new one with the details.

Just to complement my previous comment about comparisons with other tools I used before, I wasn’t saying Atom (with mixed results) had better results than VS Code. Only Sublime was better back then. On the other hand, also talking about other tools, I have Jetbrains Rider available in the company I’m working on, and I would say VS Code fuzzy search is way better. I see myself using VS Code instead quite often, because I feel it is much easier to search/navigate the source, congrats 👏 .

Thank you

[bpasero]

Sorry but, personally, I feel the VS Code fuzzy search really needs improvement. Most of the times I rely on the recent items (when available) instead, because the search rank doesn’t work for me. I type almost the perfect match to find what I want, but still, sometimes I have to scroll down to select the expected result.

Would be good to collect these cases, it is always useful to have a collection of less than ideal ranking so that we can understand why that is and if we make a fix see if our test cases are still good. Over the time, whenever I made changes to the scorer and ranking, I tried to write a test case for that scenario so that when we make changes we see what other cases fall apart (if any).

Btw, unfortunately there is not just 1 fuzzy ranking/scorer algorithm used, depending on what quick open you are talking about:

• editor history (list of recently opened editors, LCS fuzzy search NOT allowing non-contiguous matches)
• file search (LCS fuzzy search allowing non contiguous matches - unless the new quotes support is used from Tyler)
• command palette (some very old simple matcher)
• picker (that e.g. extensions can use): another simple fuzzy matcher

I think a first good step would be to align the various pickers to use the same fuzzy scoring, except maybe command palette: we try to preserve muscle memory of users and not break it. We put commands in alphabetic order when showing results to group commands that logically belong together close to each other. Some fuzzy ranker might break this muscle memory easily.