Cannot jump to symbol anymore with new smart search field

[felixfbecker]

With the old search field, often I would go (or scope) to a repo, then type the name of a symbol. I'd then get symbol suggestions, select one, and jump to it.

The new smart search field shows suggestions for the symbol, but selecting it just completes it, and hitting enter just submits a text search for the symbol.

This breaks this flow of using the search box to quickly find and jump to a symbol.

The problem is also there for files, but at least those will by default show up in the result list.

I can see different possible solutions:

• Make symbols show up in searches by default
• Add type:symbol when selecting a symbol suggestion
  • There can be a use case though for searching for references of a symbol
• Automatically jump to the first result if there is only one (if the query is ambiguous)
• Add a dedicated keyboard shortcut, e.g cmd+⮐, for jumping to a suggestion (symbol/file/repo)

[camdencheek]

@fkling any reason we can't add a command+enter shortcut to symbols like we do for repos?

[fkling]

@camdencheek The main reason for not doing that is that we dedupe symbol suggestions. I.e. if a symbol is references ten times we only show it once. If we want to make command+enter possible then we should not dedupe and add additional information (file, line) to make it possible to distinguish the locations.

However, I wonder how useful that really is. What I think would be more useful is if we could only suggest the definition of the symbol and make that "jumpable", but I don't think we can do that.

[camdencheek]

if we could only suggest the definition of the symbol

I'm not super familiar with symbol search, but it looks like it only returns definitions? e.g., this search does not return any of the places SearchInts is used

[fkling]

I'll have to take a look again then. I remember that we showed lots of duplicate useState suggestions in the past.

[camdencheek]

Ah, interesting. I can reproduce with useState in imports. It looks like maybe this is because, in Javascript, imports are treated as destructures, so we're declaring a file-local variable with the same name as the imported object in the remote file.

[camdencheek]

cc Graph (@varun.gandhi and @anton.sviridov since Linear doesn't support team pings) in case you two have any ideas about yielding only symbols that make sense as jump targets.