Detect unused imports in Kotlin without IntelliJ? (reddthat.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by dr_robotBones@reddthat.com to c/programming@programming.dev

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Is it even possible? It seems every third-party tool that did it is abandoning the feature and I can't get the deprecated but still present feature to work in Detekt or ktlint. I didn't realise the biggest challenge with Kotlin would be detecting unused import statements so I can easily remove them.

Edit: Thanks for the help everyone, but I could not get anything working so I eventually just did it manually with a little help from the android linter.

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[-] dr_robotBones@reddthat.com 2 points 3 months ago

I got the Kotlin compiler using sdkman, the closest thing to that command I found was: kotlinc -Xreturn-value-checker=full $(find . -name '*.kt')

It doesn't really work, it just gives errors for every single import that comes from a library (libKTX in my case)

[-] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

My bad, I think the option I mentioned might have existed at some point but doesn't now.

Sadly it's probably a moating strategy for jetbrains to have that as an IDE exclusive feature.

The best you can probably do is trying to dig out that functionality from the android studio source ... https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/base/+/studio-master-dev/studio.md

this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026

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