Replace All operation unexpectedly emptied the content of hundreds of .htm files

[lnourson]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes/No

• VS Code Version: (ex: 1.89.1)
• OS Version: (ex: Windows 10 / Windows 11)

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open a single-folder workspace containing many .htm files.
   (Note: several dozen files were open in the editor.)
2. Live Server extension active.
3. Perform a global Replace All from the search panel.
   Replacement pattern used:
   .css?v=c" → .css?v=d"
4. Observe that many .htm files are unexpectedly emptied.

---

Description:

During a global Replace All operation in Visual Studio Code, I encountered a severe issue:

➡️ VS Code emptied the entire content of hundreds of my .htm files.

Only .htm files were affected, but the impact was extremely damaging.

Context:

• Workspace: a single folder opened directly (not multi-root)
• Several dozen files were open in the editor
• Extensions active: Live Server
• Git was not initialized
• Regex was disabled
• Replace All was triggered from the global search panel
• Replacement pattern:
  .css?v=c" → .css?v=d"

Observed behavior:

• After clicking Replace All, VS Code emptied the content of a very large number of .htm files
• No warning or confirmation dialog appeared
• Fortunately, not all files were emptied, but almost half of them

Expected behavior:

• Replace All should never delete the entire content of files
• A confirmation dialog should appear when many files will be modified
• Replace All should only modify matched text, not wipe files
• VS Code should not silently corrupt or empty files under any circumstances

Impact:
This resulted in the loss of hundreds of HTML files and required manual recovery.
This behavior is extremely dangerous for users working on large projects.

Additional notes:
I can provide more details or logs if needed.

Thank you note:
Despite this incident, I want to sincerely thank the VS Code team for this amazing tool.
I use it every day and it has become essential to my work.
Your work is truly appreciated — thank you for building and maintaining such a powerful and inspiring editor.

[vs-code-engineering]

Thanks for creating this issue! It looks like you may be using an old version of VS Code; the latest stable release is 1.117.0. Please try upgrading to the latest version and checking whether this issue remains.

Happy Coding!