Sublime Forum

File Tree Could use Improvements

#1

Hello Sublime Editor,

There are a couple things that I don’t like about the file tree that appears in the side bar of the sublime editor:

  • As far as I can tell, you can’t get this file tree without creating a project. In fact, I didn’t even know this tree existed for the first little while that I was using the sublime editor. It wasn’t until I decided to create a project that I discovered it by accident. Why can’t you just view the file tree of your entire drive when you are outside of the context of a project?

  • Sometimes the parent directory is way off the screen and it’s hard to get back to a higher level directory, or to even know where you are in the directory tree. I really like the solution for this problem that JEdit’s File Explorer plugin uses. You can see a screenshot of this here: (http://www.jedit.org/index.php?page=screenshot&image=18). Look at the left of this. The file tree is broken up into two separate panes. The bottom pane is a free-flowing thing kind of like what you have in Sublime editor. The top one is not so much a tree, but more just a list of the ancestors of the current directory, so that’s it’s easy to see where you are in the file tree and jump back up to any ancestor directory without having to scroll around. Furthermore, another very useful feature that JEdit’s file tree has is a context menu option to jump to the directory of the current buffer. This is a good way to locate other files that you know are in the same directory as the one you are currently working on.

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#2

Have you tried dragging the folder into the sidebar? :smile:

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#3

I don’t know if that helped the original poster, but thank you skube! I had actually never tried that before. +1! :smiley:

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#4

No, I had no idea you could do that. I take it that’s just a shortcut for adding the folder to your project. That’s certainly nicer than using the silly MS Folder Chooser tree widget that you get when you go to “Add Folder” in the menu (I hate that thing).

The initial point I was trying to make though was while the sidebar seems really useful, it was not apparent that the sidebar even existed until my accidental discovery of it by creating a project. Many users of a text editor would probably be content never to set up a project and would just never find this. None of the screenshots on the front page of the Sublime Text webpage show the Sidebar, and it’s not there when you first start up.

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