Hide empty folders after apply file exclusions (user settings)

[j0nd0n7]

I'm a Unity 3D developer. Although I use file exclusions, it would be nice to hide folder that get empty after file exclusions are applied.

[bbugh]

Is there some way to hack around this until it's official?

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

This feels like something that should be an opt-in setting. It could be confusing why some folders without children in the tree view appear while others do not.

To start, I'd like to take a stab at making a general setting to not show empty folders overall.

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Edit: Unless I'm misunderstanding the code (can someone please verify this?), doing so would be a performance regression.

The way it is now:

ExplorerView contains:

• TreeModel of the directory structure
• FileFilter
  • (.updateConfiguration has the user/workspace files.exclude logic)
• ExplorerViewer that contains the FileFilter (param) and receives updates to the TreeModel

Updates to the model occur when the user's filters change, a file system event is seen, or a folder is expanded. Each folder doesn't know its children until an event occurs so that Code doesn't have to constantly monitor every file that could be in the explorer.

Knowing whether a folder is "empty" would include needing to know its children immediately, which recursively leads to potentially needing to know the state of all children, always. Consider this directory structure:

src/
    a/
        b/
                ...
                        y/
                            z/
                                file-that-might-be-excluded.txt

In order to know whether a/ is hidden, we'd need to check b/, which would need to check dirs down to y/, then z/, and finally to the file.

[isidorn]

Next milestone we plan to introduce compressed trees to the Explorer (single child nodes gets compressed into one). I believe this should make this experience better.
If the experience does not get improved I am open to a PR that would introduce a setting for this. However we can disucss this further in a couple of milestones. Thanks

[narigondelsiglo]

This would be great

[ashfahan]

Any updates on this ? VS-CODE Compact Folders is already out

Another Unity 3D developer here ✋

[Nirmal4G]

Really Need this!!

Also, Is there an 'Exclude everything except these' support in the files.exclude and search.exclude settings?

[Cdddo]

This would be a really useful feature to have, to not have a lot of "empty" folders cluttering some projects...