Windows – How to efficiently exclude .svn and .git folders in Windows 10 indexing

gitsearchsearch-indexingsvnwindows 10

I have 2 big folders "Projects" and "Studies" with lots of SVN and some GIT projects inside. I had to disable indexing for them entirely, because, due to the sheer amount of files in .svn and .git folders, the quick search in the Start Menu worked very slowly, rendering it useless (and I really use that feature).

The problem is, that since these folders are explicitly excluded from indexing not even regular "slow" file searching works in them and this is quite annoying. And I really need the ability to search my project folders.

Manually excluding each .svn and .git folder could be a solution, but it would be unmaintainable, because there's really many of them.

Can you guys suggest anything? Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

I haven't tried this, but I found an MSDN article "What is included in the index?" (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb266513%28v=vs.85%29.aspx). I was hoping that the list of exclusions would give some indication of how you might expand. But then I saw one of the comments, which looks directly applicable:

Excluding by wildcard

For those interested, you can modify these defaults and add your own by turning off the search service, modifying the registry and restarting the service. The applicable keys are located here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search\CrawlScopeManager\Windows\SystemIndex\

Any overrides you specify show up in the WorkingSetRules key. This supports wildcards so you can exclude, say, node_modules, .git .svn, etc. from search indexing. tswaters 8/1/2015

So you might want to give that a shot.

Related Question