"Symbol excludes" interfere with custom symbol preferences

[mitranim]

I want to add class names to the indexed symbol list. The bundled Symbol Index Excludes.tmPreferences interferes, causing them to be excluded. There's no obvious way to override that.

Bundled symbol settings should be whitelist-based, not blacklist-based. As far as I can tell, these excludes don't even do anything by default. What's the reasoning behind them?

If we agree on removing or replacing this blacklist, I'm willing to do a PR.

[braver]

@mitranim the blacklist could very well be a remnant from previous iterations. If you want to look into what they do or don't do, and have a reasonable test to support that we can safely remove them... let's just remove them.

[mitranim]

Well, I don't have a "test" per se, but I'm fairly confident that it does nothing.

The only settings it could be overriding are Sublime's defaults from Default/Indexed Symbol List.tmPreferences:

<dict>
    <key>scope</key>
    <string>entity.name.function, entity.name.type</string>
    <key>settings</key>
    <dict>
        <key>showInIndexedSymbolList</key>
        <string>1</string>
    </dict>
</dict>

Here's our Symbol Index Excludes.tmPreferences:

<dict>
    <key>scope</key>
    <string>source.sass meta.selector, source.scss meta.selector</string>
    <key>settings</key>
    <dict>
        <key>showInIndexedSymbolList</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
    </dict>
</dict>

There's no overlap. Like you said, probably a leftover. Should I do a PR, or will you make the change?

On an unrelated note, after posting the PR I ended up replacing this package with a stripped-down version to get rid of the bundled completions and hotkeys. They were really messing with my workflow. It would be great if that stuff was opt-in.

[braver]

I’ll make the change, thanks for the info. I just never looked into it too deeply.

With regards to the defaults (keybindings etc), there is no single right answer. We already have thousands of installs, so we can’t change anything here anyway. I personally don’t like shipping keybindings, but the reality is that most people who use Sublime don’t know anything about how it works or how to customize it. More so, seemingly, with users of front-end/webdev packages. There is an expectation for it to work well out of the box. Advanced users like you and me probably end up forking, tweaking and manually installing packages. I’d rather have that than complicating maintenance with settings or whatever.

Top tip: You can override any file in any package using Package Resource Viewer. That way you should be able to remove the completions for instance, without having to do a manual install.

[mitranim]

Nice, thank you.