Let's say I have this folder in a project: /xxx/yyy
If I look for a certain string inside folder /yyy, Sublime will show me the results, even if it has found it within a file inside a subfolder of /xxx/yyy, let's say, /xxx/yyy/zzz/whatever.cshtml (that means it's searching recursively)
BUT, If I look for the same string inside the folder /xxx (the parent folder), nothing happens and I get no results.
Why? Does it have a limit for searching recursively? Maybe it can't handle too many files?
OK, I realised now that it works, it's just too fricking slow. But the project is quite huge plus it's accessing files on another computer and Sublime Text for some reason doesn't give proper feedback about the search (e.g. takes +- a minute to show the message "Searching 38415 files for xxxx")
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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 am new to Sublime, used to using Dreamweaver as my web editor. I have my project folder open in the Sublime Text 3 and I need to search all the files for a particular link https://test.com. From what I found on the web I need to hit Shift+Ctrl+F, enter my search string and then in Where: type the folder path I want to search. I have done that but the result set is empty even though I know the string I am searching for is there multiple times.
I tried entering the full path: W:\Web\App1 (where App1 is the folder I have opened as the project folder) as well as App1 but nothing gets returned. What am I doing wrong here?
Similar to Ctrl+Shift+F, you can right-click on the folder you want to search in, then choose 'Find in Folder'
In the bottom 'Find' box, make sure to have the 'Find options buttons' (on the left of the image) correctly set.
This is a very powerful option I use very often. Now I've tested in my SublimeText3 to look for an url like the one you provide and it works fine, as usual. With this setup:
Regular Expression: Off, Case Sensitive: Off, Whole Words: Off
...but this options are pretty straightforward and shouldn't affect your basic searches.
The short version of the question: how can I get icicles to search usefully for files in directories and subdirectories, even if only given a partial match of the filename?
EDIT: The short answer is to use icicle-locate-file in the top level of your directory and use S-Tab (shift-tab) to begin completion rather than plain tab. More details in this answer.
Just as an addendum, I gave up on icicles after this as it took about 10 seconds to find files in the (large) directory tree in question each time I used icicle-locate-file. There may be a way round this delay, perhaps by creating and sets of files 'gathered' by icicles, but I began to feel that the potential benefits were being eroded by the up-front costs of working this out and by the costs of keeping the file sets updated. As the author of icicles points out below, access to *nix's locate command would allow me to use icicle-locate, which is quicker than icicle-locate-file. However, I run on Windows and the Everything utility doesn't work for me. So, back to copious use of IDO and bookmarks that expand to dired buffers.
==========
The longer version... As Emacs (24.3.1) is now my main development environment I have been exploring ways of improving my efficiency, particularly regarding filename completion for some time now. Several excellent answers to this question pointed me to ido-mode and dired-x, both of which I am now using.
Another great recommendation was Emacs' bookmarks. In particular, defining dired buffers as bookmarks and jumping to them using C-x r b mybook1 or even calling C-x r b from the C-x C-f minibuffer (this page was helpful) are two very useful strategies.
A couple of people mentioned anything and its successor helm. I have been unable to get the file location part of either package working on Windows 7. Apparently they depend on the command line version of Everything but this fails for me, as detailed in this question, to which there were some helpful responses but no definitive answers. It seems that it works smoothly on *nix but there's not much discussion of helm-locate etc on Windows. So that counts out helm and anything for filename completion.
Which brings me to icicles. In a question about making find-file search in subdirectories the asker commented that they had taken a look at "ido and icicles, but they seem to work shallowly, only within current directory".
In response to this came a comment on icicles: "you can search for any file on your system, if you want, matching any part of the file name and path" with a pointer to a page on Icicles file name input. While I appreciate the considerable effort that has gone the help pages for icicles, I didn't find this one very useful because it consisted largely of a list of descriptions of icicles functions. What would be useful to me is a tutorial that walks you through finding files.
Let's assume the following.
I am running a Windows 7 installation of Emacs 24.3.1.
I have a top-level directory containing some files and folders. In this case it is c:/iciclestest/.
I know there's a file somewhere in this section of the tree that has "grob" as part of the filename.
I want to use icicles to find this file. I have put (require 'icicles) and (icy-mode 1) in my init file.
So, off we go. Start Emacs in the scratch buffer. Hit C-x C-f. I get a File or directory prompt, with a purple plus sign to the left that I think indicates that this is one of icicles' multi-commands.
Hitting tab gets me this mini-frame, showing me the contents of the current directory.
I hit tab on the folder1 subdirectory and icicles shows me the contents of that, as one would expect.
You can see a couple of files with "grob" in the name.
Right, C-g to clear everything then C-x C-f again. Enter 'grob'. I get a "no prefix completions" message. This surprised me a little because I expected icicles to have some kind of whizzy fuzzy matching like ido-mode.
Okay, maybe I need a different command. Let's try M-x icicle-locate-file, which gives me this prompt:
If I enter 'grob' and hit confirm I just get a new file, as per below.
To recap: what I'd like to be able to do is enter a string and have icicles go and look for files or folders containing that string. My main dev folder has many dozens of directories and thousands of files so a quick find within Emacs would be a godsend.
I realise that the locate command doesn't exist on Windows so functionality will be in some ways limited, but I would have thought a recursive search of files and subdirs from the current dir based on a user-entered string would be straightforward. What am I missing? Am I going about this the right way? Can this be done in icicles?
You need to read the Icicles doc a bit more: use S-TAB instead of TAB for apropos (regexp or substring) completion. That is apparently all you want here: match grob as a substring. (No need for any fuzzy matching for that.)
Since you want files matching grob anywhere under that directory, use icicle-locate-file. Give it that directory as the starting point. (And since you want to match grob anywhere in the file name, use S-TAB for completion.)
Icicles does provide "whizzy fuzzy matching like ido-mode" (in fact a lot whizzier). Ido's "flex" matching is the same as Icicles's "scatter" matching.
You can set the kind of completion you want to be one of the fuzzy-matching types. In the minibuffer, C-( cycles among the prefix-completion methods. M-( cycles among the apropos-completion methods. True fuzzy matching is a prefix completion method. Flex/scatter matching is a poor man's fuzzy matching, and it is an apropos completion method (so use M-( to cycle to it). To change the default matching, so you need not cycle to get the ones you prefer, customize option icicle-S-TAB-completion-methods-alist or icicle-TAB-completion-methods.
In addition to the answer about icicle-locate-file, you can find files that are in marked Dired subdirectories, and their marked subdirectories, etc. recursively, using M-+ C-F (command icicle-visit-marked-file-of-content-recursive), if you use both Icicles and Dired+.
This answer provides the details.