How to exclude folders in Brackets

Brackets (Sprint 34) has a static list of excluded files and folders. The default ignored files and folders are files like .gitignore, DS_Store, and so on… Sadly, this list is hard coded in the source…

If you are like me, i.e. you use Yeoman when creating new web projects, you will be left with two huge folders (node_modules and bower_components generated respectively by NPM and bower). Those folders contains a lot of files (JS, CSS,…) and most of them are not useful for our project.

Brackets is indexing every files of the opened folder, so when quick-editing (ctrl+e) a JS function or a CSS class, or when auto-completing (ctrl+space), Brackets will try to search the given search word in every indexed files. So you can imagine the performance when you are developing with Brackets…

A quick solution is to exclude those folders from the scope of the Brackets work. Currently, in the Spring 34 of Brackets, it is not possible to exclude files and folders like the IDE Eclipse. Moreover, like I said in the beginning, the list of excluded files and folders is hard coded… So we are left with modifying the source.

If you are using Ubuntu, modify the file /opt/brackets/www/project/ProjectManager.js (don’t forget to backup the file!):

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cd /opt/brackets/www/project
sudo cp ProjectManager.js ProjectManager.BAK
sudo vi /opt/brackets/www/project/ProjectManager.js

Find the variable _exclusionListRegEx and add the regex to exclude the wanted files and folders:

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var _exclusionListRegEx = /\.pyc$|^\.git$|^\.gitignore$|^\.gitmodules$|^\.svn$|^\.DS_Store$|^Thumbs\.db$|^\.hg$|^CVS$|^\.cvsignore$|^\.gitattributes$|^\.hgtags$|^\.c9revisions|^\.SyncArchive|^\.SyncID|^\.SyncIgnore|^\.hgignore$|^node_modules$|^vendor$|^vendor_ext$|^.tmp$|^dist$/;

Save the file and restart your Brackets and Voila:

Note: By doing this little hack, my brackets editor performance is boosting! Moreover, Brackets is a great tool for TDD development!

Of course, Brackets still has a long way! But I have faith for this editor.