How to exclude duplicate lines in VS Code's search results?

Question

When I do a search in VS Code, it will return the same line multiple times if the search string is found in a line multiple times. For example, if I search for "Automobile", the following line will show up twice in the search results:

var myAutomobile = 'Ford Automobile';

Is there any way to get VS Code to display the same line only once?

(I know that I can manually remove a line from the search results by clicking the 'x' on the right-hand side, but I'm wondering if there's an automated way to do this.)

Answer 1

This does happen in the search panel results (and I don't think can be avoided) but if you enable this setting:

search.enableSearchEditorPreview (or search for "Search: Enable Search Editor Preview" in the settings)

and then click on the "open in editor" link at the top of the search results (after a new search after enabling the setting), a new editor tab will open with your search results and I don't see duplicates listed there.

More info: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/vnext/release-notes/v1_42.md#search-editor and Visual Studio Code - Include context in search results

And in v1.42 (coming later this week) you can use this command search.action.openNewEditor to directly open a search editor without first executing a search in the traditional panel.