audreyhal/vs-nice-index

VSCode package to rename `index.js` files to their parent directory names [WIP]

vs-nice-index is a VS Code extension that renames index.js files to their parent directory names.

about/index.html  -> /about
Home/index.jsx    -> /Home
server/index.js   -> /server

Why

It's common practice, in web development, to give your directories semantically-relevant names, but to give the primary file the name of index.js, index.html, index.css, etc.

Web servers like apache will, by default, automatically try and serve index.html or index.php files when you request a directory. So, http://www.google.com/ will attempt to serve http://www.google.com/index.html. This allows us to hide the file extension from the user, and provide nicer URLs.

In Node.js and ES2015 Javascript imports, this same convention was adopted. You can require or import a path like /components/Home, and it will attempt to find an index.* file within it.

The end result is that a lot of projects are packed with files like index.js, index.html, index.css, etc. Here's an example structure from a React app:

.
├── components
|   ├── Home
|   |   ├── index.jsx
|   |   └── index.css
|   ├── Header
|   |   ├── index.jsx
|   |   └── index.css
|   └── Footer
|   |   ├── index.jsx
|   |   └── index.css
├── server
|   └── index.js
└── index.html

In VS Code, this means your files will look something like this:

This is not good! All the filenames are the same. VS Code tries to be helpful by showing the directory name after the filename, but when you have more than a couple of files open, that stuff all gets hidden.

There must be a better way...

Wouldn't it be nicer if, for all index.* files, we just showed the parent directory? Something like:

This way, we get the best of both worlds. We get semantically meaningful tab names in VS Code while developing, and we can still reap all the benefits of using the index.* convention.

Similar Projects

• nice-index for Atom Editor by Joshua Comeau

Credit and Acknoledgement

• README file is an edited clone of Joshua Comeau's nice-index
• Logo Designer: Adenekan Wonderful

Author & Contributors

• Uche Jude
• Adenekan Wonderful

Enjoy!