[Explained] Sublime Project: file/folder exclude patterns

[xinxla]

Hi,

How to hide only direct children of folder with "file_exclude_patterns": [ ... ]?
I have structure like this and I want to exclude Main Folder/*.js

• Main Folder
  • Inner Folder
    • keep_me_pls.js
    • oh_and_me_too.js
• hi_there.js
• kiss_me.js
• do_not_exclude_me_pls.jsxyz
• good_bye.js

Thanks

[kingkeith]

For reference, the patterns for including and excluding files and folders are in “glob” format.

This means that * matches any number of characters, including zero, and ? matches exactly one character. The glob spec states that * should never match / or \, but unfortunately Sublime Text doesn’t follow the spec in this regard. In Sublime Text, a * will match folder_name/subfolder/file.ext. Normally, one would expect to have to type */*/* for it to match. It is therefore impossible in ST to reference a base folder without it’s subfolders.

You can however, match subfolders without matching the base folder, like this:

"file_exclude_patterns": ["scripts/?*/*.js"]

In this example, JavaScript files in the scripts folder would still appear, but not in any subfolders (or nested subfolders) of scripts.

---

To answer your question, then:

As a result of this limitation, you may have to use file_include_patterns instead like this:

"file_include_patterns": ["*.js?*", "Inner Folder/*"],

the *.js?* says include all files that end in .js and have at least one more character following that.

unfortunately, I can’t see any way to avoid needing to reference all your inner folders explicitly

Of course, if you also have non JavaScript files, then this probably won’t help much, as it will only include what matches this pattern. It seems that one can’t combine file_include_patterns and file_exclude_patterns, nor is it possible to reference the same folder twice, to give different patterns that way.

[xinxla]

Thanks for such detailed great answer It helped me somehow