Tell Sublime Text to ignore everything in .gitignore?

64
votes

Vim has this great plugin to convert the current project's .gitignore into a syntax understandable by Vim and from there exclude all those files from opening.

Using Sublime Text 3's 'Go to Anything' (CMD+P), I get lots of files I'm not interested in, such as stuff under .build and .meteor.

Is there something similar for ST3?

3
sublimetextgitignoresublimetext3
You can manually add them to your project file, and it wouldn't be difficult to write a plugin to do it for you, but I don't know of one that already exists. – bheklilr
I added them for now. It's just that with so many projects, it'd take time. And .gitignore already exists in most repoes for almost the exact same file list. – Jonatan Littke
I understand the frustration. If I had the time, I'd work on writing a simple script to do it, but I don't think I'll have the opportunity for about 2 weeks. Do you know python at all? Parsing a .gitignore would be trivial, and shoving that into your project settings shouldn't be too terribly hard. There is a setting called "file_exclude_patterns" that is editor-wide, you could put your common ones there as a temporary fix. – bheklilr
Or even better, use the git ls-files command output to populate the file list. Parsing .gitignore file is not as trivial as it looks, as it has some specific formats you would need to reimplement by hand (e.g. lines starting with ! are negated patterns). I think it would be better to let git do this work, as it knows how to do it. – MetalElf0

3 Answers

66
votes

I created a quick-and-dirty plugin, sublime-gitignorer, to solve exactly this problem.

It is currently tested on Ubuntu and Windows in Sublime Text 2 and 3. I expect it will also work on any other Linux distro or on Mac.

To install, assuming you have package control, just:

  • Press CTRL+SHIFT+P (CMD+SHIFT+P on Mac)
  • Select "Install Package"
  • Search for the Gitignored File Excluder and press Enter.

Alternatively, if you don't have package control you can copy gitignore_plugin.py to your Packages directory, which you can locate by selecting Browse Packages... from the Preferences menu in Sublime. You should really get Package Control instead, though - it's useful.

I'm not kidding when I say this plugin is dirty. The way it works is that the plugin, every five seconds:

  • Checks for Git repos located within your open folders
  • Asks Git what paths are ignored in each of those repos
  • Adds those paths to the file_exclude_patterns and folder_exclude_patterns settings.

Seems to work okay for most users, though - at least as long as the folders you're opening in Sublime aren't too huge. The presence of giant folders (e.g a typical node_modules folder) can, in combination with this plugin, slow Sublime to a crawl.

Anyone looking to contribute or report bugs should check out the issues page.

8
votes

You can get a list of all the ignored files with

git ls-files --others -i --exclude-standard

and then add this to your file_exclude_patterns in Sublime Text as bheklilr suggested.

7
votes

Assuming you have Sublime 3 and already installed Package Manager:

  1. add repo https://github.com/apc999/sublime-text-gitignore
  2. add package sublime-text-gitignore
  3. use menu item : File->Exclude Git-ignored

Have fun:)