Re: project-find-file: switch to include non-tracked files

[Manuel Uberti <manuel.uberti@inventati.org>]

On 05/10/21 21:47, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> It kind of got lost among other issues, sorry. That's doubly easy to do with 
> emacs-devel threads, so if you could use Debbugs for feature requests in the 
> future, that would be great.

Do you want me to move the discussion on Debbugs?

> Now, I've whipped up a small POC. See the attachment, try it out.

> Since 'find' without ignore instructions is as fast as 'git ls-files' (even 
> faster, in my testing, on my machine), it didn't require any changes in the API 
> so far.

Thank you. I gave it a try and it works as expected.

> But is that the behavior we want?
> 
> Currently it lists _all_ files in the directory, including, say, all contents of 
> .git/ (of which there can be a lot, depending on the project, whether it uses 
> 'git flow', etc).
> 
> Should we add the common ignores from vc-directory-exclusion-list? To simply 
> filter those dirs out?
> 
> Maybe something else too? Like grep-find-ignored-files (it lists common 
> compiled/object files which one usually doesn't want to search, or even visit)?
> 
> Combining the vars above would bring the file listing to the default 
> 'project-ignores' behavior. Which the 'transient' backend uses, for example.

I think ignoring directories such as .git would be good to speed up the command 
and make the candidate list cleaner.

> But in the previous iteration of this thread you also referred to Helm's 'C-c i' 
> behavior. Does it only list the ignored files?

'C-c i' in helm-ls-git toggles the '-o' switch for git ls-files, so it does not 
include the listing of the .git directory in its result.

> In any case, we could make 'C-u project-find-file' have this behavior: listing 
> only ignored files instead. And maybe not all of them: skipping the contents of 
> .git/, .bzr/, etc, still sounds useful. The upside is possibly having a lot 
> fewer files to choose from.

I agree with you.

-- 
Manuel Uberti
www.manueluberti.eu