Is there a way to remove unused imports and declarations from Angular 2+?

Question

Is there some plug-in of Visual Studio Code or other means that could help us to tidy and organize the imports and references quickly and effectively?

For example, there are maybe hundreds of imports like this

import { AutoCompleteModule,InputSwitchModule } from 'primeng/primeng';
import { ListboxModule } from 'primeng/primeng';

could be converted to similarily

import { AutoCompleteModule,
         InputSwitchModule,
         ListboxModule  } from 'primeng/primeng';

Or other functions like automatically removing those unused imports and declarations from the app.module or from all components throughout the project?

Thanks for any feedback!

Answer 1

Edit (as suggested in comments and other people), Visual Studio Code has evolved and provides this functionality in-built as the command "Organize imports", with the following default keyboard shortcuts:

option+Shift+O for Mac

Alt + Shift + O for Windows

---

Original answer:

I hope this visual studio code extension will suffice your need: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rbbit.typescript-hero

It provides following features:

• Add imports of your project or libraries to your current file
• Add an import for the current name under the cursor
• Add all missing imports of a file with one command
• Intellisense that suggests symbols and automatically adds the needed imports "Light bulb feature" that fixes code you wrote
• Sort and organize your imports (sort and remove unused)
• Code outline view of your open TS / TSX document
• All the cool stuff for JavaScript as well! (experimental stage though, better description below.)

For Mac: control+option+o

For Win: Ctrl+Alt+o

Answer 2

If you're a heavy visual studio user, you can simply open your preference settings and add the following to your settings.json:

...
"editor.formatOnSave": true,
"editor.codeActionsOnSave": {
  "source.organizeImports": true
}
....

Hopefully this can be helpful!

Answer 3

As of Visual Studio Code Release 1.22 this comes free without the need of an extension.

Shift+Alt+O will take care of you.

Answer 4

To be able to detect unused imports, code or variables, make sure you have this options in tsconfig.json file

"compilerOptions": {
    "noUnusedLocals": true,
    "noUnusedParameters": true
}

have the typescript compiler installed, ifnot install it with:

npm install -g typescript

and the tslint extension installed in Vcode, this worked for me, but after enabling I notice an increase amount of CPU usage, specially on big projects.

I would also recomend using typescript hero extension for organizing your imports.

Answer 5

Since VSCode v.1.24 and TypeScript v.2.9 Organize Imports was added:

For Mac: option+Shift+O

For Win: Alt+Shift+O

Answer 6

There are already so many good answers on this thread! I am going to post this to help anybody trying to do this automatically! To automatically remove unused imports for the whole project this article was really helpful to me.

In the article the author explains it like this:

Make a stand alone tslint-imports.json file that has the following in it:

{
  "extends": ["tslint-etc"],
  "rules": {
    "no-unused-declaration": true
  }
}

Then run the following command to fix the imports:

 tslint --config tslint-imports.json --fix --project .

Consider fixing any other errors it throws. (I did)

Then check the project works by building it:

ng build

or

ng build name_of_project --configuration=production 

End: If it builds correctly, you have successfully removed imports automatically!

NOTE: This only removes unnecessary imports. It does not provide the other features that VS Code does when using one of the commands previously mentioned.