I work a lot with on collaborative projects which have loads of files, but I rarely care about the majority of them and I therefore leave the majority of the project’s folders collapsed.
I’ve noticed that the folder refresh always happens in breadth-first order, and takes a fair amount of time refreshing folders I don’t care about.
Please consider prioritizing refresh of uncollapsed folders over collapsed ones.
Sidebar is just a representation. ST needs to refresh whatever changes on disk to keep in sync with the filesystem. It holds dictionary about all files in your project in RAM for fast access via Goto Anything and symbol index. No way to “priorize” some folders.
Understood, but refreshing the disk contents to RAM takes lots of time.
Consider opening a new folder and ST starts to populate the dictionary, but on a slow disk let’s say it takes 2 minutes to actually populate it.
During those two minutes, a user wants to navigate deep into the directory tree and open a file. They can’t, because the dictionary is still being loaded. They can only navigate as far as the side-bar directory has been populated.
I don’t see a good reason why the dictionary can’t be refreshed in an order other than a breath-first search.