Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment (IDE). It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports a fair number of languages (like PHP for example) and has most of the features that you would require from a simple IDE, making it a worthy tool for me to use on my sluggish home desktop PC, in place of the a bit too resource heavy, JAVA-powered NetBeans IDE.
By now pretty much all developers should be using some sort of source control system for their code, in my case the preferred one is SVN. The problem now arises that when searching for a string in all my project files using Geany’s Find in Files function, results are returned which point to files in the hidden .svn meta directories. Needless to say, this is pretty useless and definitely something which needs to be addressed.
Luckily for us though, Geany is essentially just pushing through the search request to grep to handle all the heavy lifting, meaning that we can leverage grep’s parameters in order to specify a directory to avoid searching in.
To do this, open up Geany’s Find in Files function via the Search menu, and note the last option in the resulting dialog, right at the bottom – the one that reads Extra options. Check this to enable and then add:
--exclude-dir=.svn
As easy as that. Obviously in this example I want the search to ignore .svn folders. Needless to say, you can modify this to whatever suits your individual needs. Nifty.