Reveal not visible text editor

[Bertik23]

I have a tab with a webview, I want the user to be able to click on a button in the webview, that would highlight part of his code in an open editor (or open a new one, if the file is not opened yet).

It currently works for me only with visible tabs, where I go throught vscode.window.visibleTextEditors and find the one with the file I want. If the wanted text editor is not visible a new one is opened, which is undesirable.

Is there a way to do this?

[alefragnani]

Hi @Bertik23 ,

If you don't want a new TextEditor to be created for each file you open via showTextEditor you must use the preview parameter as true. Doing so, no matter how many files you open via that button click, all of them will be displayed in the same TextEditor. You may notice preview editors because they have a italic title.

But, unless you already have a preview TextEditor opened, the preview parameter won't avoid VS Code to create a new preview TextEditor. This happens because VS Code won't reuse non-preview editors for that.

Hope this helps

[Bertik23]

Thanks for you reply. I was looking more for a behavior like this:
User has 2 columns 1 and 2, in column 1 two text editors are open with files a.c and b.c, where a.c is visible.
Column 2 has only the webview. User click in webview, tab with editor of b.c is revealed in column 1.

Afaik this is only possible if the user has the setting workbench.editor.revealIfOpen set to true. Otherwise it will always open a new tab. Even if the editor with b.c is visible. So I have to first search for visible tabs with that open file and try to set focus to that. And then use showTextDocument if the file is not in active editors, and hope.

[alefragnani]

You could try to use the TabGroups API instead, so you can look for the file in each group, and re-display it on the proper group, without worrying about the revealIfOpen setting.

[alefragnani]

I used this on my Bookmarks extension recently, to open the file in its original group/column.

function findTabGroupColumn(uri: Uri, column: ViewColumn): ViewColumn {
        if (vscode.window.tabGroups.all.length === 1) {
            return column;
        }

        for (const tab of vscode.window.tabGroups.activeTabGroup.tabs) {
            if (isTabOfUri(tab, uri)) {
                return tab.group.viewColumn;
            }
        }

        for (const tabGroup of vscode.window.tabGroups.all) {
            if (tabGroup.viewColumn === column) 
                continue;
            
            for (const tab of tabGroup.tabs) {
                if (isTabOfUri(tab, uri)) {
                    return tab.group.viewColumn;
                }
            }
        }

        return column;
    }

    function isTabOfUri(tab: Tab, uri: Uri): boolean {
        return tab.input instanceof TabInputText &&
                tab.input.uri.fsPath.toLocaleLowerCase() === uri.fsPath.toLocaleLowerCase()
    }

Hope this helps

[Bertik23]

Thanks, that helped. Opening the document using

const document = await vscode.workspace.openTextDocument(targetUri);
await vscode.window.showTextDocument(document, {
  viewColumn: findTabGroupColumn(targetUri, vscode.ViewColumn.Beside),
  preserveFocus: false,
  preview: false,
});

reveals the tab if it's already open