Without "excluding" folders, how can I stop Indexing intellij idea on start? It's very very annoying that it starts indexing on startup without allowing you to, for example, debug a test case making you wait until indexing has finished.
116
votes
I let, but anyhow it's the developer who should decide his priorities, not the app. What if I have a 100,000 lines codebase, should I wait to get indexed even if I do NOT need any of the indexing results? Is it very expensive to add a switch? I definitely think Intellij Idea is a product with a lot of room for improvement with a very ironic product name.
- Jaime Agudo
I assumed that git branch switch is VERY common, I know workarounds, I did not asked for them guys. Furthermore you are losing the point trying to convince me that is needed when it's not. I can debug in many languages without blocking the UI on the IDE. And coming back to the question all this context is irrelevant, does somebody know if it's possible to stop it or not? Assume I simply don't want to waste CPU time doing something. And you should disclaim that you are Jetbrains staff, please be objective and assume criticism, nobody is perfect ;)
- Jaime Agudo
There's no way to turn off indexing except for excluding folders or marking the files as binary. We (JetBrains) are working towards making branch switching less painful, but we're not very close to it right now. Debugging without a project-wide index might be perfectly possible in other languages; but in Java it's not (or we don't know how).
- Peter Gromov
Yeah it's definitely a way better to BLOCK the UI for minutes straight away without a chance to opt out. And you are losing the point, it's not a "user experience", it's a "developer experience", someone who theoretically knows the implications of his decisions and who usually likes to be free to choose when he wants to wait and take the coffee and doesn't need a pretended "Intelligent" sw decide for himself. And I understand you but your opinion is biased @PeterGromov, you are paid to promote Idea mate, please don't take it personally
- Jaime Agudo
Block the UI? That's not expected and worth profiling and reporting to the tracker (see intellij-support.jetbrains.com/entries/…). The editor/VCS should be responsive, though lacking "smart" functionality. I'm paid not for promoting but for developing IntelliJ IDEA, and from my experience people, even IDEA developers themselves, don't know well when index is required (in fact, for almost everything, therefore it's built immediately). I'm sorry for the troubles you're experiencing; providing CPU snapshots might help us fix them.
- Peter Gromov
7 Answers
89
votes
You can stop synchronizing/indexing each time you switch to the IDEA and it's quite useful when dealing with big projects and outside build process which triggers indexing.
Just disable checkbox System Settings -> Synchronize files on frame or editor tab activation.
Make sure you run indexing manually to update hints when needed through Synchronize menu (Cmd-Alt-Y on Mac) or File -> Reload All from Disk to run it manually for IDEA 2020 running under Linux
13
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7
votes
Now, "excluding" folders is the only way to disable indexing when a change occurs in one of excluded folders (except for generated sources that mustn't be excluded).
Checked with Intellij 2016.2.5
I suggest you to tune your Intellij configuration, see this post : https://stackoverflow.com/a/22508853/779338
4
votes
1
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It may be because of libraries folder is added more than one sub folder in the project. example in my case i have node_modules folder in two locations in the project. one is under root directory(app-->node_modeules) another one is under(app-->test-->node_modules)
Simply Right click on each folder and then selected Mark Directory As --> Excluded
It resolved my problem. Hope it would be helpful.
0
votes
After struggling with this issue for around a week and searching all the solution I came to below conclusion: either upgrade your intellij which gives you feature to pause the indexing ( I can't upgrade my intellij due to license issues ) so the other option was to disable all the plugins and then try enabling as per the need one by one.
After enabling any of the plugin if you see it behaving the same uninstall the plugin and download some alternative of it.
0
votes
If longer indexing is an issue you can enable the shared indexes.
Add this plugin in your intellij and follow the instructions from here.
