Have you ever done a cmd-T or a global find in Textmate while working on a Rails project, and found more noise than signal in the results? For example, when trying to navigate to the routes.rb file, here is what I see:
routing.rb
routes.rb - config
routes.rb - configs
routes.rake
routing_test.rb
routing_error.html
routing_assertions.rbThis is because Textmate loads my entire vendor/ directory when I open up a project, including the entire Rails source. I can find the right file (it is routes.rb - config), but this breaks my focus and keeps searching and navigation from being transparent.
Similarly, log files are loaded into Textmate by default, which is terrible if you want to search across the entire site; I’ve had searches take 60 seconds or crash Textmate just because they were digging through enormous log files.
There is a simple way to fix this. Go to Preferences, and choose “Advanced” and then “Folder References”. You’ll see two regular expressions. They both start with a !, so any files that match the pattern will be excluded from Textmate. To stop searching through your vendored copy of Rails, just add this after the first parenthesis in the folder pattern:
vendor\/rails|So the front of my folder pattern now looks like this:
!.*/(vendor\/rails|\.[^/]*And to stop including log files, add this after the opening parenthesis in the file pattern:
.\.log|The | is an “or” separator, so if you want to add more patterns, separate them by pipes. Pretty simple.
You can do quite a bit more, like excluding binary files (.jpg, .png, etc.), excluding plugins, etc. Just follow the same patterns as above.
