Option to restrict ignore to folders instead of files

[jpmschuler]

Wonderful tool!

Due to some package managers using src mode I have a multitude of gitignored folders which have subfolders with a gitignore. This results in a listing like:

- /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/nextlts/vendor/somepackage/ComposerPackagesCommands.php
- /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/staging/vendor/somepackage/ComposerPackagesCommands.php
- /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/nextlts2/vendor/somepackage/Console/ComposerPackagesCommands.php
- /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/production/vendor/somepackage/ComposerPackagesCommands.php
- /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/ddev/vendor/somepackage/ComposerPackagesCommands.php
- /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/dev/vendor/somepackage/ComposerPackagesCommands.php
- /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/

where the last entry would be sufficient

 - /Users/jpmschuler/Documents/workspace/myproject/.Build/

However it came to mind that this only happens with subfiles to an excluded dir, not subfolders. This led to my conclusion, that I don't get why to exclude single files anyways, as it would only be some single files and lead to a load of ignore configuration, which isn't that helpful.

So I'd suggest to have an option (or even default) to only exclude folders.

Proof that this might make sense: a screens long list if I tmignore list | grep .DS_Store

[samuelmeuli]

Thanks for opening the issue! I agree, only the .Build folder should be excluded. Would you be able to provide me with a ZIP of such a project so I can debug this locally? :)

I don't quite understand why you'd only want folders to be ignored. Isn't .DS_Store the perfect example for ignoring single files?

[jpmschuler]

I'll create a MWE in due time (during this week supposedly).

I don't quite understand why you'd only want folders to be ignored. Isn't .DS_Store the perfect example for ignoring single files?

Get your pro arguments, here two con arguments:

• .DS_Store is local to my machine and thus not saved in the repo because of the .gitignore. If TimeMachine won't back it up, I won't have any means of restoring it, in contrast to e.g. build artifacts or dependencies of a project which I can recreate from some scripts and definitions inside the repo.
• In other cases I have tool installed via git where the main config file is gitignored, in order not to pollute the tool repo (only a config.sample file is in the repo). This config is even more important than the silly stuff in a .DS_Store, however I won't change the .gitignore, because that's not mine

Of course this might be specific to the projects and technologies one is working with (here especially: npm, composer, docker), but my major usage scenario is drop hundreds of folders like node_modules with 10th of thousands of files, and not some single files with less than 1kb.
I'd rather drop both, but I thought why not ask - don't know that much about Swift, but having one option and and if like isFile won't impact architecture much I believe.

And P.S: this is an enhancement, not really a bug - it doesn't cause any problems at all.

[samuelmeuli]

I think these are actually two separate issues:

• Files in an excluded folder being excluded as well (I condsider this a bug because it's not the behavior I intended)
• Option to only have tmignore exclude directories (feature suggestion)

You're raising some good points about the second issue. I don't think it's uncommon to ignore single files, though. Consider a .gitignore file with ignore patterns like *.log or *.js (in a TypeScript project where JavaScript is the build output).

I'm wondering if for your use case, it wouldn't be enough to configure tmignore's whitelist to include */.DS_Store and some common config formats (e.g. *.env, *.json, *.yml) to avoid introducing a new option?