Sublime Forum

Unable to view full directory structure in sidebar

#1

I’m having some issues trying to add a directory into a new project. I basically drag the directory with my design files into sublime 3. Usually I can navigate through all the directories and expander/collapse as needed. However, for one particular project I see directories with the following symbol in the folder icon:

The problem I’m experiencing is that folders with this symbol can’t be expanded. When I try to expand them, sublime doesn’t show the directory structure below. After some repeated ‘Refresh Folders’ calls, Sublime eventually shows what’s below that directory. However this occurs for many folders in the project. The other problem is that once I close Sublime and open it later, this problem occurs with some other directories.

Just wondering if anyone knows what the above icon means? Is there a way around this. All my projects have been working properly in the past - for some reason I’m running into issues with this project and the directories in it.

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#2

That icon means that the folder it’s attached to is (or to Sublime seems to be) a symbolic link to another folder that’s already open somewhere else inside of the same directory structure.

Basically, while scanning through folders to find all of the files and sub-folders in a project, Sublime keeps a record of the folders that it’s seen previously and if it runs into what appears to be a link to a folder that it’s already seen, it displays this icon and stops looking inside.

The reason for that is to ensure that it doesn’t end up in an endless loop in some situations, such as if you have a folder that contains a folder that links to a parent, in which case the scan would go on forever.

That said I think the information that it uses to determine if a folder is a link (or that it’s seen it before) relies on the underlying file system to provide correct information back. In some cases that’s known to go wrong, such as if your file system is being served over SSH, which I think sometimes provides dodgy info.

It sort of sounds like that’s what you’re seeing here, if refreshing the folder list or restarting makes it change.

What sort of platform and file system is your project being used from?

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#3

Thanks for the info here. I’m using Sublime 3 on Windows. The actual project files are stored on a UNIX system - I believe they’re accessed via a samba port of some sort. Is there a workaround for this in Sublime or is this just a known limitation with Sublime with certain file systems?

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#4

Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions for this issue? Is it just a limitation of Sublime with certain file systems or is there a workaround for this? Thanks.

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#5

what shows in the ST console? (View menu -> Show Console)
it normally logs the reason why it thinks it has found a duplicate/linked folder, which may help identify how to work round it

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#6

I see alot of scan messages like this:
scan: /folder1/folder2/testcases has been seen before, skipping (using inode) previous path: /folder3/folder4: 18446618218034503696

I had to edit the paths for certain reasons but the above is what I’m seeing in the console output.

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#7

I’m seeing a identical output as @rthomas. I would like to add that workflow is impeded greatly by this behavior. I have to restart sublime to get the directory tree responsive, so that when I click to expand more items get fetched and are displayed. It seems like this design may need to be addressed. I typically use sublime with multiple projects open at a time so I thought maybe shutting down other projects would help but even shutting down other projects nothing triggers in sublime to prompt a rebuild.

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#8

I’m guessing Sublime has no easy way to resolve this issue that @jawabiscuit and I are seeing?

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#9

No, it has not. ST was not designed to handle the whole filesystem tree in the sidebar. It is more or less meant to handle a couple of folders which form a project. Just like opening a Project in Visual Studio or any other IDE.

As every file in the sidebar is added to an internal dictionary in RAM to power all the Goto … features, you’ll quickly hit resource limits if you try to add the whole filesystem.

The sidebar is not an ordinary file explorer.

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