How do I remove directories from Indexing in Android Studio?

Question

I have a large project folder that contains many sub projects. Only 4 are part of the Android project, the rest are C code.

However, it appears that Android Studio is indexing ALL of it, which takes a long time.

How do I exclude these other directories from indexing?

There no way to explicitly do it, and the Module Settings only lists the Android projects so I cannot remove the other folders from there.

Answer 1

1. Select the directory in the Project explorer.
2. CtrlShiftA or ShiftCmdA
3. Search for Excluded and hit enter.

Careful, I haven't been able to find a way to 're-include' folders back yet.

Answer 2

1. (optional) Switch to project view if you can't see the folders you want to exclude
2. Right click the folder you want to exclude
3. In the contextual menu click "Mark directory as" --> "Excluded"
   It should look like this:
4. (optional) If you want to include a folder, click "Mark directory as" --> "Cancel exclusion"

Answer 3

Use the 'idea' plugin to exclude directories. For some reason, it seems the idea configuration is ignored if a subproject is configuring it (and will always exclude the project.buildDir and .gradle folders), but it works if you tell the root project which directories to exclude:

In your root project build.gradle file, do

apply plugin: 'idea'
idea {
  module {
    excludeDirs.add(file('path/to/subproject'))
    excludeDirs.add(file('path/to/othersubproject'))
  }
}

After syncing, you'll notice that the root projects .iml file contains corresponding <excludeFolder> tags, and that Android Studio no longer indexes the directories.