Here is my example, where I could have some input to filter directory subfolders.
The direct answer to the question is that this is not possible; the list of files and folders in the side bar is controlled by what folders you add and the settings that you include/exclude files and folders from within those folders. In theory you could try to modify the settings to change what appears in the side bar, but every time those settings change the file catalog needs to be rebuilt, which is something that can take some time (particularly in something with a large node_modules folder). It also causes all of the folders in the side bar to fold up.
The expected workflow is more designed around working with files than with working with groups of folders and that workflow centers around the Goto Anything panel. Choosing Goto > Goto Anything in the menu will open a panel showing you a list of every file that is currently contained in the side bar (except binary files).
The panel can filter text via fuzzy matching using as many search terms as you want (in any order you want) and will move the most likely matches closer to the top of the list. It also learns over time what files you pick when you use certain filters.
For your use case here you can open the panel and use a filter like node_modules or nmod/ to filter to files in the node_modules/ directory, acorn/ to see only files that exist in folders that match acorn, or a combination. You can also include fragments of filenames like lodash/ indjs to bring the index.js of the `lodash/ package to the top of the list.
The best way to get a feel for how this works is to play with it a little bit. Note also that the context menu in open files has a Reveal in side bar command that will focus the side bar on that file, which can be a handy way to see the other siblings of files you have open.
Related
I save several projects in a same folder by manual click Project -> Save Project As...
and I used to use cmd + ctrl + p to open Switch Projectlist to switch between projects
and everything's works fine.
but today, I accidentally remove my Switch Project list in by click Project -> Open Recent -> Clear Items, so my Switch Project list is empty now...
I know I could add them back through reopen ALL my projects. due to the number of projects is pretty a lot, that will be kind of annoying to add them back one by one.
I wanna know if there's a smarter way to do that for me.
maybe import all my *.sublime-project files from folder or something.
thanks
Short of manually opening every project, I don't think there is any way to do something like this directly. There isn't a command or plugin endpoint that I'm aware of that lets you open a project by name or filename, so it's not possible to create a plugin to do the work, and Sublime doesn't have the ability to pre-load the list of packages directly either.
That said, it is possible to manually update the list of recent projects, but whether or not that is more or less work than opening all of the projects is something to consider.
If you use Preferences > Browse Packages from the menu or the command palette, a file browser will open on your Packages folder. From there go up one directory level and go inside of the Local folder, where you will find a Session.sublime_session file.
Sublime saves it's state into this file when you quit it, and uses it to restore state when you start it again. Here you will find all of the saved information, such as the windows and files that were open and so on.
Changing this file will change the data that Sublime loads, so you can modify the session file to set up the data that you want. You need to make sure that you modify the file while Sublime is not running or your changes will be ignored and clobbered away. Also it's a good idea to make a backup of the file before you start in case things go pear shaped.
Down near the bottom of the file you will find a top level key named workspaces, and inside of it a recent_workspaces key:
"workspaces":
{
"recent_workspaces":
[
"/home/tmartin/local/src/OverrideAudit/OverrideAudit.sublime-workspace",
]
}
This is where the list of recent projects is stored for use in the menu and the quick switch project command. Particular things to notice are that the entries are naming sublime-workspace files, and that the paths are absolute.
NOTE: On windows, the filenames stored in the session file are in a format like /C/Users/tmartin and not c:\users\tmartin; on that platform you need to make sure that you adjust the paths accordingly. As long as there is already at least one entry in the list when you look at the session file, you can easily see how to construct the paths that you need.
Despite the name of the commands and menu items, what you're actually switching between is different workspaces. Every sublime-project is associated with a sublime-workspace file, which acts as a dedicated sublime_session file for that particular project. This mapping is one-to-many in that you can have multiple workspaces for the same project file, allowing you to reference the same paths in multiple windows but have different window layouts.
While Sublime is not running you can edit this file to add in the full paths to all of your workspace files; when you start Sublime up the list will be populated (every sublime-workspace file knows what sublime-project it is associated with).
What remains is whether or not it's quick to come up with the list of files in a way that you can easily paste them into the session file.
In SublimeText3 binary_file_patterns excludes files from being found in Files or fuzzy search (Goto Anything) while index_exclude_patterns prevents files from being indexed.
Since we know that not indexed files cannot be found and assuming that untraceable files do not need to be indexed, what are the differences and implications by the usage of one over another?
Sublime maintains a catalog of all known files based on the folders that are currently open in the window/project, and that catalog of files is used to populate the Goto Anything file list and also the list of files that are searched when you do Find in Files.
You can control what appears in the catalog by using the file_exclude_patterns and folder_exclude_patterns settings to stop files from appearing in the sidebar (and thus in the catalog). As you mentioned you can also use binary_file_patterns to indicate that files should still appear in the side bar, but should not be offered in the Goto Anything panel or searched by Find in Files.
In addition to the above, as long as index_files is turned on, then in addition to the file catalog Sublime also runs an indexing process against the files in the side bar as well.
The indexer runs in the background using some number of threads (controlled by index_workers) and essentially loads every file in the side bar, applies the appropriate syntax definition, and then gathers the list of symbols that are marked as ones that should appear in the index (this is a per-syntax setting). The index_exclude_patterns setting specifies files which should not be indexed, even if they appear in the sidebar.
The index is used to power the Goto Definition/Goto Reference/Goto Symbol in Project functionality; it's literally just a list of all of the indexed symbols, what files they appear in, and where in that file that they appear.
Your assumption that files that are not indexed are ones that can't be found is not correct; files that are not indexed can still appear in the side bar and be found by Goto Anything, they just don't contribute symbols to the index, which means the above functionality will not show any content from those files, but you can still open and search them.
So overall, the implications of the two are:
If you want a file to appear in the side bar but you don't want to search inside it or have it eligible for opening with Goto Anything, add it to the binary_file_patterns.
If you want a file to appear in the side bar but not contribute symbols to the index, then add it to the index_exclude_patterns setting.
Files can appear in both settings, in which case you can see them in the side bar but Sublime pretends that they're not there for purposes of all of the above functionality.
Right now I do ⌘t then scroll through autocomplete, or start typing the name (but half the time it doesn't find it).
Sublime doesn't find a file in many cases. For example, I typically have all my files called index.<ext> nested inside some folder. So I might have:
my/long/directory/structure/index.js
my/long/directory/structure2/index.js
my/long/directory/structure3/index.js
my/long/directory/structure.../index.js
my/long/directory/structuren/index.js
my/long/directory/index.js
my/long/directory2/index.js
my/long/directory.../index.js
my/long/directoryn/index.js
my/long/index.js
my/index.js
...
But in sublime you have to search for an exact path. I can't search this:
my directory index
And get results for directory, directory2, directory..., directoryn, I just get empty results because there is not my/directory. I can't remember the full folder path most of the time, so it takes a lot of effort to do so and I end up just navigating in the sidebar to find the file which takes some time.
Wondering if there is a better/faster way of doing this. Basically searching for a file by snippets/keywords of the complete path. So m dir would return my/long/directory, etc.
The first thing to note is that you do not have to search for an exact path; anywhere that Sublime provides you a list of items to select from and a text entry, fuzzy matching is in play. In your example searching just for idx will narrow down the list to all items that have those characters in that order, even if they're not adjacent to each other.
The entries show you visually how they're matching up, and there's a fairly sophisticated system behind the scenes that decides which characters make the best matches (relative to some hidden scoring algorithm):
In addition to this you can use multiple space separated terms to filter down the list. Each term is applied to the list of items resulting from the prior term, so they don't need to be provided in the same order as they appear in the file names.
This helps with searches where you know generally the name of the file, and from there can further drill down on segments of the path or other terms that will help narrow things down:
Something to note here is that as seen in these images, the folder structure is my/long/directory/structure, but the names of the files as seen in the panel don't include the my/ at the start.
In cases where your project contains only one top level folder, that folder isn't presented in the names of the files. Presumably this is because it's common to every file and thus not going to be a useful filter. As such trying to use my in the search field will return no matches unless one of the files has an m and a y somewhere in their filenames.
This isn't the case if there are multiple top level folders; in that case Sublime will include the root folder in the names of the files presented because now it's required to be able to distinguish between files in the different folders:
In addition to this, note that for any given filter text you enter in a panel, Sublime remembers the full text of the item that you selected while that filter text was being used, and uses that in it's scoring to prioritize the matches the next time you search in the same panel. The next time you search with the same term, Sublime will automatically pre-select the item that you picked last time under the theory that you probably want it again.
The search terms and their matches are saved in the session file and in your project's sublime-workspace files, so as you move from window to window and project to project you're essentially training Sublime how to find the files that you want.
My advice would be to try and flip your thinking a little bit. In my opinion the power of the fuzzy matching algorithm works best when you try to find files in a more organic way than trying to replicate the path entirely.
Instead, I would throw a few characters from the name of the file that I'm trying to find first, and then add another term that filters on some part of the path that will disambiguate things more; a term of idx s1 in this example immediately finds the two index.js files that are contained in structure1 folders, for example.
In a more real world example the names of the folders might contain the names of the components that they're a part of or something else that is providing a logical structure to the code, so you might do idx con to pull the index.js from the controller folder or idx mod to find the one in the model folder, and so on.
Regarding a better/faster way to do this I don't think there is one, at least in the general case. Sublime inherently knows every file that's in your project as a part of indexing all of the files to power other features such as Goto Symbol and it uses file watchers to detect changes to the structure of the open folders.
Anything else, including a third party plugin or package, would need to first do a redundant file scan to accumulate the list of files and would also have to replicate the file watching that Sublime is already doing in order to know when things change.
I've tried this but it doesn't seem to work:
{
// index_exclude_patterns indicate which files won't be indexed.
"index_exclude_patterns": ["tmp/*", "*.cache", "*.log"],
}
Perhaps I need to reindex? But I don't know how to do that...
Your issue is that the index is used to collect symbols for Goto Definition and has no effect on the list of files that are presented to you when you use Goto Anything. So adding those folders to the list of files to exclude in indexing doesn't stop you from seeing them in the file list.
Goto Anything offers you all of the files that are currently contained in your project (if you're using one) or all open folders, excluding any files that it considers to be binary, so in order to stop files from appearing in the Goto Anything panel you need to either have them removed from the project or considered to be binary.
The folder_exclude_patterns and file_exclude_patterns settings allow you to indicate what folder and file patterns respectively should not be considered part of the project. Extending those settings would remove the files from the sidebar and thus from Goto Anything.
If you want to be able to still see the files in the sidebar but not be offered the ability to jump to them with Goto Anything, you can modify the binary_file_patterns setting. That tells Sublime what files are considered to be binary, which will stop it from showing them in the Goto Anything panel or searching them via Find in Files but will still show them in the sidebar for you to manually open.
folder_exclude_patterns and file_exclude_patterns can be used in your sublime-project file (if you're using one) so that they can be set on a project by project basis. binary_file_patterns only works as a global setting, however.
Either way, you probably want to base your custom settings on the defaults or you may accidentally have files appear in your project that are currently being hidden.
Here's a frequent situation: You have about thirty files checked out into a specific pending change-list. After working on those files, and before submitting them, you needed to move them to a folder (external to deposits, so a simple "Integrate" wouldn't be suitable).
Using the "Show In - Explorer" option, you'll get a lot of window popped-up. And that's just painful (and sometimes, the system just cannot open all of them).
So, question is, is there a simple way to copy-paste multiple files from a change-list without doing it individually?
You can do this with a custom tool.
In P4V, open the custom tools manager via the Tools->Manage Custom Tools... menu item
Click New->Tool... to open the Add Custom Tool dialog and enter these parameters (xcopy isn't the ideal app for this, but I'll talk about that later1)
alt text http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/6678/p4editcustomtool.png
Now you will be able to select all the files in your change list, right click on them, and a new item will be available in the context menu Copy selected files to another location..."
alt text http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/4003/p4vcustomtoolincontextm.png
An input box will appear, asking you where you wish to copy the files.
alt text http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/7612/p4locationprompt.png
Click OK and the files will be copied to the location you entered in the input dialog. Maybe...
1There are some problems with xcopy:
the target directory must already exist
it doesn't seem to work if the path contains spaces
if the process fails, you're process list will fill up with a bunch of instances of xcopy.exe that are stuck trying to do who knows what
the custom tool will no longer work if the previous condition occurs
I tried robocopy also, which would be perfect if there was a way to pass it the source directory, but P4V custom tool editor doesn't provide the parent directory as a parameter. Ideally, you should write your own file copy utility, if this is really important to you. It wouldn't require that much effort.
Lastly, the P4V custom tool editor offers a file browser, but not a folder browser, and the latter is what you really need for a tool such as this.
So, play around with the custom tool thing. You might be able to come up with an answer to your problem.
I know you want to do these things outside of Perforce, but the best I can think of is if you create another workspace specifically for exporting files. You can sync your Perforce workspace to contain only the files in a particular changelist.
In this workspace, try giving the files in your changelist, after it is submitted, a particular label. If you sync your workspace to this label, it will delete every file that does not have this label based on this Perforce page. (do Find for label in that page)
p4 sync #label_name
This involves Perforce, but it does provide a way to get only the files you want.
I believe you can also accomplish this only using changelist numbers, but it may be more complicated. I'm not 100% sure this works
p4 sync #none
p4 sync #changelist,#changelist
I think this will sync files only in this changelist.