Idea: Support Renaming Unresolved Variables

[hediet]

After copy&pasting, I ended up with this code:

public extendInputRange(extendedInputRange: LineRange): LineRangeMapping {

    const startDelta = extendedInputRange.startLineNumber - l.inputRange.startLineNumber;
    const endDelta = extendedInputRange.endLineNumberExclusive - l.inputRange.endLineNumberExclusive;
    return new LineRangeMapping(
        inputRange,
        new LineRange(
            l.outputRange.startLineNumber + startDelta,
            l.outputRange.lineCount - startDelta + endDelta
        )
    );
}

Now I would like to replace l with this. This is not very easy to do.

It would be awesome if I could rename l to this.

[lgrammel]

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll think about how to best resolve this with a single refactoring.

It's already possible to achieve the renaming with a refactoring combo:

1. extract l
2. change it's value
3. inline l

[lgrammel]

I thought more about this and evaluated various ways of achieving this. It turns out you can easily achieve this by using multiple cursors:

1. select "l"
2. start multiple cursors with ⇧⌘L
3. change to this
4. end multiple cursors with Esc

Since there is a pretty elegant built-in solution, I'm wondering how P42 could improve on this.

[hediet]

This only works if l is not part of some other word.

[lgrammel]

Ah, right. One idea I have is a replace expression code assist where you could select an expression, invoke the action, and then all it's occurrences would be replaced with a text that you'd enter in a text box. Would that be closer to what you imagine?

[hediet]

That would be cool!

[lgrammel]

I've added a "Select expression occurrences" code action in v1.117.0. When you select an expression (selection boundaries must match expression), you can invoke the P42 action menu and start a multi-cursor selection on all occurrences:

This is different from the VS Code standard multi-cursor, because it checks that the expression occurrences use the same variables, this context, etc.