Add include option for file indexing

Feature Requests
1

It would be great to have an option to explicitly list file or directory paths to include for indexing, particularly for a very large directory structure where relevant files may be scattered across several deeply-nested subdirectories.

One use case would be to run a linux command to invoke a tool with strace and capture the list of files that are accessed in the process. A project can then reference this list in an include file for indexing, and other directories may be additionally added as needed (obeying any existing ignore files).

EDIT: I just saw an equivalent pattern is to exclude all files using * then selectively undo using !.

1 Like
2

Following up on the exclude syntax, I hit a couple issues relating to my experimental use case:

  1. The common root of the filesystem path has admin-only permissions so a .cursorignore file can’t be added there, and even if it did have permissions it couldn’t be used for any project-specific includes.
  2. Subdirectories on separate mount points don’t show up if not automounted when opening the root path in Cursor through SSH. In linux doing ‘cd’ into the subdir would invoke automount so it would become visible afterwards when doing ‘ls’ on the root.

A way to provide absolute/full paths in a file to Cursor to use for setting up a project directory tree for indexing and inclusion would resolve the above issues, other than manually using File->Add Folder to Workspace.

3

I created a script to run a command with strace and create a code-workspace JSON file:
{
“folders”: [
{
“path”: “/full_path_1”
},
{
“path”: “/full_path_2”
},
…
],
“settings”: {}
}

Then loaded that as a project in Cursor. It seemed to work, but there were these issues:

  1. The folder view only shows the final subdirectory name, and there could be several of the same name, making it confusing to navigate (hovering the mouse over each directory will show the full path) plus unclear how to include a file with @name if existing in more than one folder.
  2. Indexing is capturing only a small subset of the files (Cursor Settings->Features->Codebase Indexing). I suspect the duplicate folder names are the reason but I couldn’t confirm definitively (how to get a listing of all files synced?)