Exclusion lists

[smashwilson]

Support per-watch-root exclusion lists, likely expressed as arrays of globs.

[icetee]

Then there will be such a capability? https://github.com/kaelzhang/node-ignore
Is it expected in the near future?

[smashwilson]

It is something I want to do, but won't get to soon.

Some of the complications that will need to be dealt with here include:

• Multiple PathWatchers with different options can be backed by the same NativeWatcher. This means that each NativeWatcher will need to be able to subscribe to events on the union of the path sets expected by each PathWatcher (or, equivalently, with an exclusion list that's the intersection of those from its PathWatchers), displaced by relative paths as appropriate.
• Exclusion filters will need to be represented in both JavaScript and C++ and passed to the worker thread along with each COMMAND_ADD message.
• We'll also need to either introduce a new command to modify an existing NativeWatcher's exclusion list, or delete and re-create watch roots as its exclusion lists change.
• Exclusion lists should be respected when prepopulating a RecentFileCache on MacOS and Windows as well as when recursively building an inotify watcher tree on Linux. The polling thread will also need to respect the list.

As a workaround until then, you can always filter watcher events JavaScript-side:

const watcher = require('@atom/watcher')
const ignore = require('ignore')

const ig = ignore().add(['.git/*', 'node_modules'])

const w = await watcher.watchPath('/root/path', {}, events => {
  for (const event of events) {
    if (ig.ignores(event.path)) continue;

    //
  }
})

[icetee]

Thanks for your description and JS example!
It requires much more development than I thought first. 🙈