Exclude files/dirs by pattern

[rockyzhang24]

How about adding an option to exclude some files/directories based on a pattern to make them being hidden?

E.g.,

require("neo-tree").setup({
	filesystem = {
		filters = {
			respect_gitignore = true,
			exclude_pattern = { 'node-module', '.DS_Store' }
		}
	}
})

Thanks.

[cseickel]

I'm not seeing a situation where someone would want to hide a file in Neo-tree without actually making it hidden at the OS level or putting it in a gitignore file. In your example, node_modules should be in .gitignore and .DS_Store is already hidden and won't be shown by default.

[cseickel]

I just realized that there is no way to rename node_modules, and therefore no way to hide it if it's not in a repo. Just another reason to hate the nodejs ecosystem...

I can add something. I am considering adding a more generic process_item option that is a function to be called on every item before it is added. That way it could be used for other purposes, one of which being returning nil to exclude it from the results.

[rockyzhang24]

Thanks.

I'm not seeing a situation where someone would want to hide a file in Neo-tree without actually making it hidden at the OS level or putting it in a gitignore file

Not really. For example, sometimes I want to see the whole contents (including hidden ones) in a certain directory that is not a git repo, but only hide .DS_Store that exists in each folder on macOS. In this situation, I cannot put it into .gitignore and all hidden files need be shown other than .DS_Store. So we need an extra option for such a file. nvim-tree has this, it is filter.custom.

[nyngwang]

Waiting for this. I'm working on a python project where I need to ignore folders like __pypackages__/, __pycache__/, which provides a use case to:

I'm not seeing a situation where someone would want to hide a file in Neo-tree without actually making it hidden at the OS level or putting it in a gitignore file [...]

TL;DR: there are indeed some boring stuffs that need to be added to version control, while no one will modify it again after creation, so no need to show it in a filetree.

(might not be a good example, but: In python, like it or not, there are cases where those (mostly empty) __init__.py are needed for module scanning purpose while I will be very happy to hide them from a filetree, since I will never need to modify them after creation.)

[cseickel]

I'm going to work on this now. Since it seems like all examples so far are exact names and not patterns, I plan on implementing it as an exact match which will be much faster. Let me know if anyone sees the need for patterns.

[cseickel]

Anyone interested in this feature, please see the discussion at: #171

[cseickel]

This has been added to a new v2.x branch, along with breaking changes to the filters config. These options have been completely changed:

    require("neo-tree").setup({
      filesystem = {
        filtered_items = {
          visible = false, -- when true, they will just be displayed differently than normal items
          hide_dotfiles = true,
          hide_gitignored = true,
          hide_by_name = {
            ".DS_Store",
            "thumbs.db"
            --"node_modules"
          },
          never_show = { -- remains hidden even if visible is toggled to true
            --".DS_Store",
            --"thumbs.db"
          },
        },
      }
    })

WARNING: v2.x is brand new and far from release. It will have many breaking changes, although I will alert you to these changes and try to auto migrate your existing config options.

[nyngwang]

[...] Since it seems like all examples so far are exact names and not patterns, I plan on implementing it as an exact match which will be much faster. [...] link to comment

This must be a good idea. I prefer clearly specify any file I want to ignore, so I won't accidentally ignore some files in the future. The speed should have the highest priority, too.