Sublime Forum

Folder updates don't work on remote file systems

#1

I am using Sublime Text 3 to edit files in a Docker container that are exposed through Samba to a MacOS host. I’m experiencing two problems:

  1. Changes in the folder structure in the Docker container don’t appear in the folder hierarchy in ST3, even if I do a “refresh folders” (Project menu).

  2. With index_files: false, ST3 still seems to want to visit a lot of folders other than the ones I have currently expanded. This slows down ST3 in actual use.

Is there a better way to edit remotely mounted file systems, or are these issues fundamental features of ST3?

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#2

If you’re using SMB1, SMB2 has less overhead.

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#3

index_files controls the symbol indexing that powers Goto Symbol in Project and Goto Definition. However, Sublime Text has a “catalog” of all files and folders that powers Goto File. You can’t turn this feature off. Sublime Text will list the contents of every folder added to the side bar, and recurse into every subfolder.

Since “Refresh Folders” doesn’t do anything, my hunch would be that your connection is slow enough, or the folder folder tree large enough that it hasn’t finished the initial catalog generation.

Do you see a folder with animated dots? This will indicate the folder is still having all of the files and subfolder enumerated.

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#4

That’s unfortunate. Perhaps the developers will consider adding a preference that prevents ST3 from digging into parts of the file system I don’t care about (usually easily inferred by me not attempting to visit them).

BTW, my “connection” is to a docker container on the same machine. But I’m looking at yocto image builds, including the Linux kernel. So there’s a LOT of stuff there I often don’t need to look at.

Thanks for the tip.

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#5

It is kind of foundational to how Sublime Text has always worked. I very much doubt we’ll add an option to disable some of the most foundation parts of the editor. My recommendation would be to only add folders to the sidebar that include files you care about. This will make things faster, and the indexing will show you relevant results. You can use various options to exclude folder you don’t care about.

Yes, excluding things you don’t care about should help significantly, in many ways. You can add the folders you care about to a project and use the project quick switcher to switch between that and any other projects you work on frequently.

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#6

Perhaps. But to me, the foundational feature of an “editor” is that it edits files. And Sublime does that very well. All of the other stuff involving project management is icing on the cake, and not particularly useful to me. Removing uninteresting folders is not really practical for the kinds of projects I’m talking about. They are huge and scattered across many different folders at all levels.

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#7

If only the good “editor” you are interested in, you could avoid adding your remote path to the sidebar at all, but navigate through your filesystem with your favorite explorer app and directly open single files to edit.

It’s just not a simple explorer you see on the left. I honestly wouldn’t like to miss the Goto File function which often is much quicker than searching through thousands of files in the sidebar.

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#8

I’m not suggesting anyone have to miss that feature. Just that it be optional.

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#9

I also have this problem. Most of it lies in windows WSL thinking the files are being opened and save remotely.

If anyone has a fix for this please let us know.

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