Ignoring files in Projectile

Question

After googling and being recommended projectile as project navigation, I ended up trying that. I'm now frustrated by the lack of tutorials and/or explanations on how it works, so I was hoping somebody here knew how to handle it. Here is my current problem:

I can't understand how to use the .projectile file. Now, it works in my other project, but here is just completely fails to ignore files. I've tried C-c p i to clear countless times.

How does projectile work, and why doesn't the file actually ignore those files? And as a sidenote, could anyone recommend anything more reliable than projectile, if this is just how unreliable it is?

Answer 1

To ignore files matching a pattern, such as files with a specific extension, you need to include a wildcard in the pattern.

For example:

-*.swp
-*.meta

There are some examples of this on the project page in Github, in the section on "Ignoring Files".

I've used Projectile daily for a while and in my experience it has always been very stable. Of course, as with any Emacs package you'll need to decide what best fits your work flow; and you may need to tweak configurations to suit your needs.

Update

From the comments, note that file ignore patterns are only working when using native indexing. This may be a bug when using alien indexing.

Answer 2

You should add a "/" before your items, like:

-/.meta
-/.projectile

This is the source code:

(defun projectile-paths-to-ignore ()
  "Return a list of ignored project paths."
  (-non-nil (--map (and (string-prefix-p "/" it)
                        ;; remove the leading /
                        (substring it 1))
                   (cdr (projectile-parse-dirconfig-file)))))

We must put a "/" before the items to make them to be valid.

Also, it uses string-prefix-p to check the file. If you want to ignore the files recursively, you can replace string-prefix-p with string-match-p.

(defun projectile-remove-ignored (files)
  "Remove ignored files and folders from FILES.

Operates on filenames relative to the project root."
  (let ((ignored (append (projectile-ignored-files-rel)
                         (projectile-ignored-directories-rel))))
    (-remove (lambda (file)
               (or (--any-p (string-prefix-p it file) ignored)
                   (--any-p (string-suffix-p it file) projectile-globally-ignored-file-suffixes)))
             files)))