Cannot exclude root folders while searching

[sandy081]

Testing #50498

• In a MR workspace, try to exclude root folder using /folder1/ and search. Results are still shown in folder1.

This happens irrespective of setting search.enableSearchProviders"

[roblourens]

Yeah glob matching starts under the search folder so there's actually no way to do this...

You can include individual folders with ./name but that doesn't work in 'exclude'.

[sandy081]

Is it possible to provide a special syntax for excluding/including root folders?

[roblourens]

I would support ./name in 'exclude' too. It works in 'include'

[pacifier007]

Similar to this, it would be useful if the root folder could be referenced, not just in this use-case but in multi-root use-cases as well.

See my use-case that would be resolved easily if we could reference root folders: #91102 (comment)

Also related:
#48262
#82145

[OmeGak]

What happened to @roblourens' idea of supporting per-folder settings in multi-root workspaces? It would also be helpful here.

[unional]

This is a major issue for multi-root workspace. Currently I'm hitting with the watch file limits (which I cannot change the environment) and there isn't a way to do files.exclude on the each root.

[nsgundy]

Looking for the same thing, would like to exclude a folder on a particular root that then doesn't get excluded on any of the others.

Something like this:

"files.exclude": {
  "${workspaceFolder:rootA}/exclude": true
}

[thomaslaurie]

This was an annoying issue to track down, I thought search was bugged for the longest time.

Its an issue for me in large projects because I like to have folders like node_modules and dist added as root folders for easier access. However this prevents them from being excluded in search results, which is obviously undesirable.

[gjsjohnmurray]

There is a precedent for the suggested "${workspaceFolder:rootA}..." notation. It is valid in debug configurations. See doc here and this code pointer:

vscode/src/vs/workbench/services/configurationResolver/common/variableResolver.ts

Line 182 in cf49223

private async evaluateSingleVariable(environment: Environment, match: string, variable: string, folderUri: uri | undefined, commandValueMapping: IStringDictionary<string> | undefined): Promise<string> {

[neilmenon]

Hmmm, there have been several requests for this feature but they all keep timing out due to lack of votes. Is there a way to unify all these and get enough votes to get this in?

[andreamah]

Hmmm, there have been several requests for this feature but they all keep timing out due to lack of votes. Is there a way to unify all these and get enough votes to get this in?

This is already considered as a feature request and is in our backlog. Issues on the "Backlog Candidates" milestone are ones that are evaluated based on number of upvotes.

[Dtreschl]

If I am understanding the issue here properly, although not a complete fix, I've been able to exclude a root folder locally via a slightly hacky solution.

Adding the root folder in question (let's call it folder_1) to any of the VSCode search settings doesn't seem to remove it from the search, as noted above. And folder_1 contains many thousands of files, so it doubles my search load time. It's mostly got .c, .h, & .py files in it. To exclude those from my results, I put a .vscode folder into folder_1, and a settings.json inside of that with the following contents:
<root_dir/folder_1/.vscode/settings.json>
{ "search.exclude": { "**/*.c": true, "**/*.h": true, "**/*.py": true } }

My "files to include line" in my search editor is *.c, *.h, *.py , so by excluding those types from folder_1, they don't get included in my search results. Search time is halved, and it won't search for those file types within folder_1 any more. I admit, it's a hacky solution, as a repository with many file types would make this slightly clunky. But if anyone is looking for a temporary fix to this, hopefully I've been of help. It does not seem that you are able to just exclude **/*.*, at least on my end.

[starball5]

Somewhat related: #82145.

Somewhat related on VS Code: How can I exclude files from one of a multi-root workspace's root folders from search in VS Code?

[jcrben]

Does this also include files? I'm not having luck excluding a root file - package-lock.json.