Project Management: Allow editing of project history

[iamntz]

There are some moments when I need to either change the location of a project or just quickly edit a file on it.

Obviously, I'm talking about quick switch project window.

You can't edit projects listed there (and if you move a project, you will have it listed twice), you can't delete projects (so you can end up with a very long list) and so on.

I guess that this should be fixed in a way (no, clear recent projects is not the solution)

[FichteFoll]

Totally +1 on this, I also missed this a few times already.

I know that the recent projects are stored in the session file but I doubt you can dynamically edit that within a sublime plugin because it will probably be overwritten when ST exits.

[schlamar]

because it will probably be overwritten when ST exits.

Yes, it will be. Edit the session outside of ST is the only (bad) workaround I can think of.

[mrfatguy]

Adding #710 to this one -- "Project added to Switch Project even though it isn't available".

If particular project cannot be opened (not found / permissions denied / I\O error) it is still being added to the recent project history list displayed in Switch Project and Quick Switch Project windows.

This shouldn't happen, IMHO

Such list item is unusable and clicking / selecting it ends with:

and opening a new, empty Sublime Text 3 window.

(as requested by @FichteFoll)

[mrfatguy]

@iamntz @schlamar I wouldn't call that so bad workaround. If I can simply:

• close ST3,
• edit session file (%APPDATA%\Sublime Text 3\Local\Session.sublime_session),
• do, whatever I need, in external editor (end of this file -- section workspaces / recent_workspaces),
• save this file,
• reopen Sublime Text 3,

then what's the problem?

I mean, let's be honest. Number of paid licenses for ST3 is low (very low), so company can afford to hire full time developers team, we have just one guy doing all the stuff (@FichteFoll, as I was told) and the overall progress of Sublime Text 3 is slow. In other words, there are so many more important things to do / fix / implement / change in ST3, that I would rather like to see one, single developer doing something else, more important, than implementing editing functions for stuff you can already edit in a simple manor, by altering simple-structured text file.

As @FichteFoll mentioned in my recent issue (#710), we have already over seven hundred issues in total of which 418 remains opened. Some of them are opened for two years or more. Do you really think, that implementing such stuff like editing history list in ST3, when you actually can edit it outside it with ease, is so imporant?

[FichteFoll]

@trejder

Pesonally, yes, I think this is a problem and a bad workaround. Sublime Text wants to be a text editor and, in fact, the text editor that you can use for everything. Well, it might not explicitly want that, but it allows us to do so. If we then need to leave the editor by using a different one to edit the recent project history because such a feature doesn't exist built-in (and can not even be correctly implemented using a plugin), then this is a flaw in the idea of being the text editor.

Fortunately this hasn't been an issue for me lately since I haven't moved around projects in a while and thus they didn't disappear.

Either way, an issue tracker is meant to track all kinds of issues, regardless of importance. The developer(s) may chose themselves whether they want to fix a certain issue or handle another one first, depending on their judgement. We have several issues in place that allow easier filtering.

By the way, I'm not affiliated with sublimehq, which to my knowledge consists of two people, one who does all the development and one who answers support emails. I just manage this github repo because forums are not suited to be issue trackers and things were getting messy with all the duplicates and inability to tag or label.

[mrfatguy]

@FichteFoll Sorry for taking you (incorrectly) as a part of sublimehq team! :>

As for the other arguments, well... let me put it that way. If someone uses Sublime Text 3 as just the pure text editor then this might be a little problem for him or her. When writing my arguments, I was looking at ST3 as I always look at it. As a developer's text editor and de facto entire coding IDE. Thus, I couldn't imagine, how any developer, bind to work with AJAX requests, text files, JSON files etc. etc. could have any problem editing this list in an external editor. After all, in ST3 everything is JSON, right? Nobody complies about editing menu items or key bindings or plugin settings by editing text files and changing JSON.

I agree, that my point of view can be a little bit... erhm... rusty! :> But, I still think, that even, if there should be something done around this issue, then this should rather be implemented like other things in ST3 (key bindings, settings etc.). You should be able to edit certain file etc. I can't imagine stuff like Delete button in Quick switch project window! :>

[iamntz]

@trejder let's assume for a moment that i completely uninstalled/removed Notepad.exe and the only editor that could edit a text file that's available on my machine is sublime. How would you do the operations you described above?

Anyhow, back in the day i did this little script: https://github.com/iamntz/sublime-session-editor

It's ugly, it's dirty but it does the job :)

[mrfatguy]

@iamntz I completely don't belive, that you'd uninstall Notepad, but you have actually convinced me! :>

And as for your code. Well... all our codes are dirty and ugly. But they're working, right! :>

[arcturus140]

I'd just like to add, that I would only like to have these projects removed from the cache. It should not actually delete .sublime-project files from the disk. The quick switch view should only contain the projects I am most interested in.

I have 5 projects listed there with the exact same name from 5 different branches. They should remain on disk but I don't necessarily want all of them in the quick view listed!

So within this list, a right-click on project -> delete would be nice!

[FichteFoll]

Yes, it should only remove the entries from the history, not the files from the file system.

There is a standalone script to clean up any missing project file references for both Sublime Text and Sublime Merge here:

https://github.com/STealthy-and-haSTy/SublimeScraps/tree/master/session_cleaner

[AmjadHD]

any interest from the devs ?

[Ultra-Instinct-05]

As of Build 4092, there is a new menu item Project -> Open Recent -> Remove Deleted, that will remove any deleted .sublime-project files so there is no need to manually close ST and edit the session file or use the above script (atleast for ST).

[BenjaminSchaaf]

Fixed in Sublime Text 4.