All of the file names in the sidebar, regardless of file extension, display with a leading '/*" characters… They don’t seem to change when the file is modified, or any other time that I can discern.
Anyone know why they are there? What they represent? And most importantly, how to get rid of them? They take up valuable horizontal space and convey no information.
I noticed them before, I’m guessing they are meant to be file-icons. But then try @addons_zz excellent icon theme 
It’s an icon meant to represent that it is a source-code file. Compare to files with extensions .txt and .html
To me, /* reads as “comment”. But I’m not sure what a better alternative would be.
I use the package called A File Icon. If you install it, you should get rid of them:
, you can try it out: https://github.com/ihodev/a-file-icon
Is that what it’s supposed to be? I thought it was an error or a placeholder for a missing image file.
Not every language uses /* as a comment; not even most, so it’s incorrect for more common file types (ruby, python, swift), than it’s correct for (C, JS, etc.)
Something better might be Font Awesome’s document icon, a page rectangle with a turned over corner. Or even better than that, nothing at all. It’s useful to see the folder icons, to distinguish them from the files, but I’d much prefer NOTHING for files, so I get a few extra pixels for the file name. The presence of a folder icon is clearly distinguishable from the absence of a file icon.
So you want to disable file and folder icons to save some space? I think you can edit your Sublime Theme file and adjust the spacing. See:
Perhaps you can search for a theme which already saves the space for you. Maybe the Boxy Theme could help you:
