visual studio code - Go to implementation instead of TypeScript declaration

Question

When I click an imported variable while holding Cmd in VSCode, I often end up looking at the TypeScript declaration of that variable. Is there any way to have VSCode take me to the definition of it instead? I don't use TypeScript myself, so the feature isn't helpful to me right now.

Answer 1

This is currently a limitation of how VS Code handles JavaScript and TypeScript IntelliSense for external modules. See this issue for more info

To summarize: VS Code's JavaScript and TypeScript support is powered by TypeScript behind the scenes. To understand the APIs of external modules, TypeScript uses d.ts files for performance and scalability reasons. This way it does not have to try to load or parse all of the module's code itself. The downside to this approach is that we cannot map back to actual JS limitation.

To workaround this, libraries can bundle declaration maps that map from .d.ts files back to source .ts (or .js) files. However many libraries currently do not include these