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

[Dmitry Gutov]

Hi Manuel,

On 04.10.2021 11:33, Manuel Uberti wrote:
> Sorry to bring up this again, but is there anything that can be done on 
> this?
>
> The proposed solution with C-u C-x p f seems very reasonable to me, I 
> don't know what others project.el users think though.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

That *would* require a more involved change in project.el, but at least 
we'd make it after carefully weighing the options.

project-find-file-no-ignores.diff
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