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Large Projects

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peterflynn edited this page Sep 23, 2014 · 2 revisions

To conserve memory, Brackets currently disables some functionality on projects that contain over 30,000 files. This includes most features that search across multiple files, such as Find/Replace in Files, Quick Edit (inline editors), and Quick Open.

You may see the following error message in that case:

This project contains more than 30,000 files. Features that operate across multiple files may be disabled or behave as if the project is empty. Read more about working with large projects.

Workarounds

Tips for working around this limit & re-enabling those features:

Open a more specific subfolder

Open a more specific subfolder in Brackets to screen out parts of the subtree you don't need to edit. For example...

  • If you've been opening the root folder containing all your software projects, instead open the folder for one specific project. You can use the dropdown in the sidebar (just above the folder tree) to rapidly switch between different projects - also accessible via Ctrl-Alt-R (Win) / Cmd-Alt-R (Mac).
  • If you've been opening a folder which contains your front-end HTML/CSS/JS code and your backend code in a server-side language, consider opening just the subfolder containing the front-end code. (As above, you can quickly switch folders when you need to work on the backend code).

Exclude folders like node_modules

Use the unofficial Exclude Folders extension, which removes the node_modules folder from Brackets's view of the filesystem. Because npm can easily place 10,000+ files in this folder, this can drastically reduce the number of files Brackets is looking at.

Exclude Folders automatically hides node_modules from Brackets, but you can hack it to exclude other folders as well.

Future Brackets improvements

In the near future we hope to provide a clean way to exclude folders directly in Brackets core - no extensions needed.

It's unlikely that the limit on project size will go away soon. Because Brackets is a lightweight code editor and not a large-scale IDE, it's not a high priority to support enormous projects with GBs of files.

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