Change color of methods without reference

[raulvaldoleiros]

It would be great if vscode java changed the color method, maybe to grey, on methods without any reference to it.

Similar to what intellij have.

[rgrunber]

There's a few workarounds / other ways to achieve something similar, though I guess this is definitely something that could be done, given that we have the data from reference code lens (ie. 0 references), and could just use the semantic highlighting on the language server side to correctly set the highlighting.

Using java.referencesCodeLens.enabled: true (assuming editor.codeLens: true is also set), you would see 0 references over any method declaration that is not referenced anywhere.

For private methods only (a little simpler because they need not be searched throughout the entire project), there's :

.vscode/settings.json

{
	"java.settings.url": ".vscode/settings.prefs",
}

settings.prefs

org.eclipse.jdt.core.compiler.problem.unusedPrivateMember=error

[raulvaldoleiros]

Hi @rgrunber,

Thanks for the update. For private methods sonarlint shows a warning message and change the method color to grey.

For non-private methods the referencesCodeLens shows there isn't references but don't change the method color.

I will use your suggestion for referenceCodeLens, thanks 👍 IMHO this improvement should be considerer for your future backlog.

[rcsilva83]

Agreed. It would be better to have a warning like it does for private methods.

[rgrunber]

I never really mentioned it in my original comments (just the workarounds), but the main problem is performance. For a given public method declaration, it can take a while (for large projects) to compute all the references. Maybe it would go a bit faster since we can terminate a search the moment we find a reference. However we would effectively be enabling java.referencesCodeLens.enabled-like computations, but the reason we have that setting is to give users the option to improve performance.

This is definitely possible though.