I use Textmate as my favorite editor, especially when I’m working on a Symfony project. Recently though I decided to switch to integrating the Symfony installation as an external dependancy to my project. This had some major advantages but one very big disadvantage.

When I want to open a file in the project that I have open, I just type Command-T for “Go to File..” and start typing the file name (very much like Spotlight). When I added Symfony as a dependancy this added quite a few more files to my project, which made the search dead slow and returning numerous useless results.

So I decided to do a quick search on how to exclude folders from this search and found it. In the project’s side panel, select the root of the folder structure. Then press the I in the right-bottom corner. This opens an information window in which we edit the folder pattern to add an extra exclude. For Symfony I decided to exclude the “vendor” folder so I added a “|vendor” after the “|CVS”. Be sure to save the project afterwards or all settings are lost.

You can do the same in the general advanced settings of Textmate but keep in mind that any existing projects need to be updated manually to include this new pattern.