Warn against unused imports

[balta2ar]

Is it possible to gray out unused imports in the same way that PyCharm does?

[gandhis1]

This kind of crosses into linter territory, I would argue. Also, doing Sort Imports removes unused imports I believe.

[DonJayamanne]

@balta2ar I agree with @gandhis1. Primarily because one of the other popular languages (Nodejs) doesn't do this on VS Code, instead it relies on the linter warnings to inform the user of this problem.
In summary, we won't be implementing this for now in order to maintain consistency within VS Code.

[jeffwidman]

Shouldn't this be closed then?

Also, I agree with the decision--this is linter territory, no sense adding/maintaining that logic here as well.

[brettcannon]

@jeffwidman yep, it should be closed 😄

[balta2ar]

Related issue in TypeScript repo: microsoft/TypeScript#8165

[balta2ar]

A very similar feature request has been added to May 2018 sprint: microsoft/vscode#15710. I hope you guys reconsider this after the API is mature in VSCode.

It is true that there is a small overlap with the linter's functionality, but red squiggle under a variable/import can mean a bunch of different things, and you don't know what it is until you hover with a mouse. In contrast, grayed out variable/import is definite, leaves no room for guesses, does not require reading the message, conveys the information immediately.

I suggest that you try it for yourself in PyCharm, for example, live with it for a while. Nobody likes bloated software, but this IS very useful in practice.

EDIT: another related request: microsoft/vscode#20219

[brettcannon]

@MikhailArkhipov would it be possible to warn against unused imports in the analysis engine?

[MikhailArkhipov]

Yes, as well as about unresolved ones. Needs some work since this info is not currently in the portable LS. I will open PTVS issues on this.

[giyyapan]

@MikhailArkhipov Hi, about the analysis engine you're talking about, would it be a possible to remove all unused imports in the engine?
I didn't find any issue discussing "removing unused imports automatically", if it's not included in the engine, maybe I should open one.

[brettcannon]

@giyyapan detection first, then we can talk about lightbulb quick fixes. 😉

[MikhailArkhipov]

There are 4 parts to this
a. Squiggle unresolved imports (PR microsoft/PTVS#4367)
b. Offer code action to install it
c. Detect unused imports in language server
d. Offer code action to remove/sort imports (also fix microsoft/PTVS#4255)

[brettcannon]

I think in that list the priority should be a, c, d, b (as getting b to work well due to name differences between package names and the project name on PyPI is hit-or-miss).

[MikhailArkhipov]

@AlexanderSher actually works on this (see #2049)

[simkimsia]

Sorry as a user of vscode-python is this available yet? if so, how do I turn it on? if there's a workaround using linter, i will be just as happy to adopt. Now using pylint

[brettcannon]

@simkimsia please follow the issues on the python-language-server repo if you would like to know when support lands in the language server.

As for linters, I believe both Pylint and flake8 can warn against unused imports if you turn on their respective warning.

[amittleider]

It would be even better to have the "Sort and remove unused imports" like PyCharm.

[Astrantia]

@brettcannon looks like this is done in LS?

[brettcannon]

@Astrantia nope, this isn't done yet.

[luabud]

Closing because it's being tracked here: microsoft/python-language-server#18