Unreferenced/Unused Method, Field highlight

[mamilic]

Type: Feature Request

When I write and develop in Java a lot of code is written and changed, due to nature of development. Someties is happens that some variables or even methods don't get used as initially thought, it would be beneficial if there is a way to provide unused method, field highlight via graying out the field name, or method name respectively.

Extension version: 1.28.1
VS Code version: Code 1.87.2 (863d2581ecda6849923a2118d93a088b0745d9d6, 2024-03-08T15:14:59.643Z)
OS version:
Modes:

[fbricon]

This is what you get today:

[mamilic]

Do apologies, didn't know that it works in some cases and in some it doesn't. It is not working in follwoing cases

• With Enums
• With public static final fields and public final field
• With public class methods

Would it be possivle for example in case of Constants class, as it does have any references to be grayed out?

[fbricon]

public modifier means a 3rd party consumer could actually use your code (eg. you're building a library), so would report false-positive "unused" diagnostics.

[mamilic]

Thank you for explanation. Just curious, what would be your approach finding and removing unused public methods, fields, enums from code?

[fbricon]

You can try using Intellij, but that feature seems pretty controversial, so much so that people tend to disable it.

It's unlikely such feature will land in vscode-java.

Now if you really really want to get that feature working in vscode-java, I'd suggest you write an extension for vscode-java, that would embed https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/unnecessary-code-detector, stripped of all its UI dependencies. Then you may be get something working. maybe.

[mamilic]

Thnank you for suggestions.