Suggest an idea for Knip

Introduction

Currently, Knip has the following config properties:

• ignore
• ignoreBinaries
• ignoreDependencies
• ignoreExportsUsedInFile
• ignoreMembers
• ignoreUnresolved
• ignoreWorkspaces

Here, "ignore" really means "ignoreFiles", but that is not really clear from the name alone. Even though this seems like a minor quibble with the tool, it is a cognitive hurdle to use the tool properly.

My User Story

I consider myself to be a veteran user of Knip. However, today, I started with the following config:

export default {
  ignoreBinaries: [ "tsx" ],
  ignoreDependencies: [ "complete-lint" ],
};

I needed to change this config to ignore a new file. So, I naturally tried adding a "ignoreFiles" option, forgetting that it actually supposed to be called "ignore", and then Knip failed to work properly, and let to some frustrating time wasted. If I am being frustrated as a veteran user, then surely other people who are not already familiar with Knip will also encounter difficulties with this.

Recommendation

Since this would be a breaking change, we could start by allowing both "ignore" and "ignoreFiles" interchangeably. And then we could provide a "hint" for people to rename it. And then you could finally remove "ignore" in some future major version.