How to: Enable automatic import sorting in VS Code

There’s a VS Code setting that enables automatic organizing of imports on file saves.

It primarily does two things:

• sorts imports based on ESLint settings
• removes any unused imports

Aside from being a timesaver, this also avoids linting errors (which is especially useful in CI/CD codebases where linting errors will stop a job from completing).

What’s great is you can set it in your user or project settings and forget about it, and it’s only a couple lines.

// settings.json

{
  // put this in your settings object
  "editor.codeActionsOnSave": {
    "source.organizeImports": true,
  },
}

And that’s it! Now when you save, your imports magically sort themselves out!

Comments

[Jordan Tucker]

Organize Imports is not the same thing as Sort Imports. Organize Imports will remove unused imports, which sounds handy, however it's quite annoying if you add an import and save before using it.

Fortunately, "source.sortImports" works just like "source.organizeImports" without removing the imports you haven't used yet.

[DerZyklop]

@nikkizol not sure about how vscode does it, but if you let eslint do the job (via eslint-plugin-imports) instead of vscode, then you can achieve this with the setting option "newlines-between": "never",.

[onikd08]

"source.organizeImports": true was giving a type error in my editor. It had to be a string rather than boolean. I put the string value "always" instead boolean value "true" and it fixed the problem.

[MainFish]

just restart VS Code

[Mykyta Zholkovskyi]

Hi, I have source.organizeImports but it doesn't remove blank lines between import declarations, it there any rule for this one?

[Pierre-François Salmand]

Hi, with the package eslint-plugin-simple-import-sort as well as eslint-plugin-import this works:

// in settings.json

 "editor.codeActionsOnSave": {
    "source.fixAll.eslint": true,
    "source.organizeImports": true
  },

// in .eslintrc

"plugins": ["simple-import-sort", "import"],
  "rules": {
    "simple-import-sort/imports": "error",
    "simple-import-sort/exports": "error",
    "import/first": "error",
    "import/newline-after-import": "error",
    "import/no-duplicates": "error",
  }