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.
Related
1st, I want to cover what this question is not about. There are 100's of articles that talk about how to search for folders with dots within their names. This is not the question. This is about searching for files within a folder that has dots in its name.
Say I have a folder
c:\public\dev\process.ui.help\
I have another folder
c:\public\processuihelp\
I have exact copies of the same files in each folder
help.csproj
help.cs
help.cs has a line in it like
//find this - SearchForMe
if in explorer and I search "SearchForMe", then explorer only returns help.cs from the 2nd folder but not the first. It may be treating the dotted folder names as extensions.
Edit: in the index options, any folders with extensions are automatically being de-selected. If I reselect them and save, they are de-selected again.
Is there any work-around or alternative search?
Why? : In this large development project (10's of projects, 1000's of folders), I am using dotted folder names to organise namespaces without creating a deep hierarchy of folders. Windows allows dotted folder names.
I haven't searched with built-in windows searches for a long time.
I just replicated your situation and tried searching with "Search My Files" and with "Everything", two tools I use frequently and both found both files immediately. Maybe give either or both of them a try and see if they do what you are looking for.
Edit: Everything is by voidtools, search my files by nirsoft, both are freeware.
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.
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'm making the move to ST3, and I'm having some trouble. I'd like to be able to delimit the quick-open filepath (⌘ + T) with periods instead of slashes or spaces. However, I can't find the setting to do that.
For example:
component.biz_site_promotions.presentation
should be able to open the file that
component biz_site_promotions presentation
would.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
There is no setting in Sublime that changes the way this works; the search term is always used to directly match the text in the list items (except for space characters).
Note however that the Goto Anything panel uses fuzzy matching on the text that you're entering, so in many cases trying to enter an entire file name is more time consuming anyway.
As an example, to find the file you're mentioning, you could try entering the text cbspp, which in this case is the first letters of all of the parts of the file name in question.
As you add to the search term, the file list immediately filters down to text that matches what you entered; first only filenames that contain a C, then only filenames that contain a C that is followed somewhere after by a B, and so on.
Depending on the complexity and number of files that you have in your project, you may need to add in a few extra characters to dial in better (e.g. comb_s_pp). Usually this search method will either end you up at the exact file you want, or filter the list so much that the file that you want will be easier to find and select.
Additionally, when you select an item and there was more than one possible match, Sublime remembers which item you selected for that particular search term and brings it to the top of the search results next time you do it, under the assumption that you want the same thing again.
As you use Sublime more (and with different projects) you will quickly get a handle on what partial search terms work the best for you.
In addition to finding files, you can do other things with that panel as well, such as jumping to a specific line and/or column or searching inside the file for a search term and jumping directly to it. This applies not only to the current file but also the one that you're about to open.
For more complete details, there is a page in the Unofficial Documentation that covers File Navigation with Goto Anything
As an extra aside, starting with Sublime Text build 3154, the fuzzy searching algorithm handles spaces differently than previous builds.
Historically, spaces in the search term are essentially ignored and the entire input is treated as one search term to be matched character by character.
Starting in build 3154, spaces are handled by splitting up a single search term into multiple search terms, which are applied one after the other.
This allows multiple search terms to hit out of order. For example, index doc in build 3154 will find doc/index.html, but it won't find it in previous versions because the terms aren't in the right order.
As such, assuming you're not currently using such a build (as of right now it's a development build, so only licensed users have access to it), moving forward if you continue to search the way you're searching in your question, you might start getting more results than you expected.
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.