Negation patterns in foam.files.ignore

[n8layman]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

It would be nice to be able to configure foam.files.ignore to exclude all files/folders except a specific directory (e.g., resources/notes/**). However, negation patterns (!) do not seem to work as expected. Both of the following just ignore everything in the open workspace.

    "files.exclude": {
      // Hide everything except the "notes" folder
      "**": true,
      "resources/notes/**": false // Explicitly include this folder
    }

or

"foam.files.ignore": [
  "!resources/notes/**",
  "**/*"
]

Describe the solution you'd like

Enabling exclusion or negation patterns would make it a lot easier to limit foam to a single folder.

Describe alternatives you've considered

The only viable alternative I see right now is to specify every other folder except the one we don't want excluded manually which isn't very scalable.

Screenshots or Videos

No response

[n8layman]

Or maybe add something like files.include or foam.files.regard that takes a higher priority than ignore?

[n8layman]

Another reason this would be useful, if there isn't already another way to do it, is to limit foam to indexing only a specific extension (e.g., *.md).

[n8layman]

If there is some other way to limit foam to a single folder in the project tree that would also work for me.

[riccardoferretti]

Yeah it would make sense to have a foam.files.include which would limit the files scanned by Foam.
Especially if you can have more than it would serve the great majority of cases.
The file discovery algorithm would be something like:

1. find files to include
   • by default */
   • if foam.files.include is defined, use that
2. from the previous list, exclude anything that matches a pattern from the exclude patterns