Sublime Forum

Sublime does not show all files and folders in its sidebar

#1

I am using Sublime Text 2.0.2 on OS X (10.8.5). Most of the times, when I work on a project, I open the according folder so that it shows in the sidebar. Until now this has always been working perfectly.

Now I cloned a really big repository with lots and lots of folders and files, deeply nested within each other. To be exact: It’s 20894 files within 4326 folders.

When I open the top-most folder of this repository, everything looks normal - but some folders appear as empty folders. Hence it looks like as if there were no files, although there definitely are some, even folders will not be shown.

It looks as if Sublime cuts everything below a certain folder and refuses to show it.

Does anybody know what causes this behavior and how to fix it?

Just waiting doesn’t help: Although it may be that Sublime works in the background to read the tree, even after two hours of waiting nothing happened to the not-shown files and folders. So apparently there must be another problem.

And there is no exclusion pattern.

In Sublime’s console it says:

scan: /some/folder has been seen before, skipping (using inode) previous path: /some/other/folder inode: 27425614.

The folder /some/folder is missing. It may be that this is correlated, but I’m not sure. Any ideas?

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File browser issues in Kubuntu 13.10 64bit
#2

I think the problem is that Sublime Text doesn’t reindex things that are symlinked (I believe) which means that symlinked directories are empty in the sidebar.

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#3

Hi there, goloroden. leesei from SO here.
Glad that you gathered the info and posted up here.

I’m not sure if ST2 is designed to handle your project’s size. Hope other experienced user can answer that.

More points I thought of:
Do your project have loads of symlinks? The find command I suggested cannot find files in symlinked folders.
Also, did you tried ST3? ST3 builds an index per project to save the scanning time. ST3 can work along side ST2. So it wouldn’t hurt trying.

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#4

@adzenith: This sounds like my issue. How may I fix it?

@leesei: Thanks for pointing me to this forum :smile:. Yes, there are symlinks (lots of :wink:), so this may be the issue (as adzenith has also pointed out). The only question left then is how to solve it…

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#5

As it seems this is a well-known issue with symlinks, which is also not fixed yet in ST3 (see sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/8 … e-sidebar/ for details).

So it seems we have to wait and see…

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#6

Now that symlinks seems to be the problem, you may try adding follow_symlinks to your project file (ST3’s created project has this as default):

{
    "folders":
    
        {
            "follow_symlinks": true,
            "path": "/home/leesei/dotfiles"
        },
        {
            "follow_symlinks": true,
            "path": "/home/leesei/scripts"
        },
    ]
}
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#7

Not sure if this is exactly the same problem, but I’ve had the issue where folders show in the sidebar but cannot be expanded to show the files within.

I’ve found that removing/deleting the .sublime-workspace file for the respective project seems to rectify it, at least in my testing so far. Hope that helps.

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#8

Can’t believe it’s still not fixed after 8 years! It is so annoying. I created a folder but it displays it as a symlink in sidebar that I cannot open. Renaming or recreating it doesn’t help. Have to restart Sublime after it happens

Error from console, if it will help:

scan: /Users/Admin/Code/ibiquity/dashboard-api/src/modules/solutions-basket/test has been seen before, skipping (using inode) previous path: /Users/Admin/Code/ibiquity/dashboard-api/node_modules/@ibiquity/add-solutions-basket/node_modules/@ibiquity/solutions-basket/test inode: 12924283711

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#9

That’s an indication that this folder exists elsewhere in the files that have already been loaded into the sidebar, so Sublime refuses to scan inside since that could easily cause an undetectable circular loop of file scanning that never ends.

If restarting Sublime makes it stop happening (or happen in a different place) that’s usually an indication that you’re using some sort of networked file system that is not returning correct file metadata on request.

As seen in the message you posted, Sublime relies on the file system properly providing details on folder to know if it’s seen them before; if your file system doesn’t return valid information for those requests, there’s nothing Sublime can do about it.

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