alfred:ignore comment doesn't ignore recursively

[caleb531]

HI,

 

I'm a huge fan of Alfred, and I use it every day for many things. In my setup, there are always a number of directories I like to exclude from Alfred's result list (such as any node_modules/ or bin/ directories). Currently, I must always manually add them to the Privacy tab in Spotlight preferences, though this is far from ideal (because I have two Macs, I must perform this chore on them both).

 

I llooked through the Alfred docs in search of a better solution (ideally, something I could automate) and discovered the alfred:ignore Spotlight comment, which was exactly what I needed (or so I thought). However, after applying alfred:ignore (programatically, of course) to all directories I desire to exclude, I noticed something rather peculiar and counterintuitive. It seems that alfred:ignore only ignores the directories themselves (the ones to which you add alfred:ignore), but not any their subdirectories. As a result, though I no longer see the ignored root directories in Alfred, all of their subdirectories still show in the results.

 

Things I've tried: reloading Alfred's cache via the reload keyword, and clearing Alfred's application cache under Alfred Preferences > Advanced, but neither of those options made Alfred ignore the subdirectories of the directories I've ignored.

 

Questions: is this a bug or is this the expected behavior? And if the latter is true, then how could I tell Alfred to recursively ignore directories in a way that can be automated?

 

I hope that all makes sense. Please let me know if I need to clarify anything.

 

Thanks in advance,

Caleb

Edited July 1, 2015 by caleb531

[deanishe]

This is, AFAIK, the expected behaviour.

Alfred doesn't do much in the way of post-filtering the results it gets from the metadata subsystem. It will ignore individual files and folders marked "alfred:ignore", but it won't then crawl up the file tree to see if any parent directories are marked "alfred:ignore".

This is for performance reasons, and is (again, as far as I know) very unlikely to change.

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve, but perhaps you could create a Smart Folder that would show all the folders you wish to exclude (e.g. "all folders named 'bin' or 'node_modules' or …), then drag them from the Smart Folder into Spotlight's Privacy tab. And then repeat for any folders that subsequently show up in the Smart Folder.