How can I prevent VS Code from jumping to the bottom of a file after formatting?

Question

How can I prevent VS Code from jumping to the bottom of a file after formatting?

I select the whole file content (using the Ctrl + A), then I format everything (using the Alt + Shift + F). After that I would expect my file to be formatted and the view not to move. The file gets formatted, but the view jumps to the bottom.

How could I prevent this jumping?

Tollefson

Answer 1

When you are doing Ctrl+A your cursor is implicitly moved to the end of the selection, hence the end of the file. Therefore, your cursor is not moved at the end by the formatting but by the selection.

The solution is to format the whole file (with Alt+Shift+F) without selecting the content before (Ctrl + A).

Moreover, in your case, Ctrl+A was useless because you are using the shortcut for formatting the entire document. If you only want to format a selection, the shortcut is Ctrl+K Ctrl+F.

Castor

Oh. The magic has never been easier. Thank you. :) – Tollefson

Yeah, simple answer. Though, when the file is extremely long, Alt+Shift+F may still go to end of file, happened to me before. – Sheeree

Answer 2

I was facing similar issue on saving file even without selecting all content.

Format on save was ON using Prettier formatter.

Problem was the file size, when it is huge say more than 100KB this issue started.

After breaking the file content into different files and removing unnecessary content in the files to reduce the size, issue resolved.

Provo

I have the same issue, but this doesn't really answer the question. why is prettier behaving this way, and how to prevent this? – Midshipmite

@MARC, question was not on why Prettier is behaving like this, it was how to prevent after Formatting, what I suggested is to Prevent it by reducing the file size by moving some of the content to another file and import it.. I dont have answer to why Prettier is doing that. – Provo

@Midshipmite This bug was likely introduced in plugin version 9.5. Reverting to 9.4 works for me. More details: github.com/prettier/prettier-vscode/issues/… – Canara

Answer 3

This could (currently, or in the past) be due to a bug in VS Code related to its extension API, or in an extension using that API to implement formatting support.

For an example of a VS Code bug, see https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/71707.

If you have the Prettier extension installed, know that it's had issues with this in the past, and continues to have them- especially for very large files:

• Cursor moving to end of file #409 (actually, this was due to the previously listed VS Code issue)
• Jump to end of file when formating huge JS file #2883
• vscode format on save on big file cursor alway jump to the end of the file #2920 which is suspected to possibly be an issue with VS Code itself
• When formatting a large ts file (ts file,4000, 5000 lines), the cursor will move to the end of the file #3119, which people are currently working around by changing their prettier configuration to set endOfLine to "auto".

If you're getting an issue like this, you can do an extension bisect to find out if it's a specific extension that's cause this, or just check your settings to see what you've configured the default formatter to be for the language you're seeing this problem in, and then check the issue tracker for that extension (you can find the link to its issue tracker in its page in the Extensions View or in its marketplace page) to see if the issue has already been reported, and if not, raise a new issue ticket to report the issue (in the appropriate repo), providing as much detail about how to minimally reproduce the issue. You can also try rolling back to previous versions of the problematic extension to see if the problem doesn't happen in previous versions.

Mousy

setting endOfLine to "auto" worked for me in large HTML files – Crumble