TextMate won't find files in project folder

Question

This was working before, but now whenever I use TextMate to find matches across all files in my project folder, it says searched 0 files.

Has anyone had this happen to them and what did you do to fix it?

Answer 1

Yes, this has happened to me. I've been able to fix it in an number of ways.

Starting from the beginning;

[Edit -> Find -> Find in Project] or [Command + Shift + F] is how you open the Find window with your project preselected.

This should produce a window similar to this;

Some important fields;

• "In: " is set to your project folder.
• "Regular Expression" is unchecked.
• "Matching" is set to *. This will search every file

Any of these could cause unexpectedly empty searches.

However, this is pretty much day to day stuff, so once you've checked this there's a few more things to look at.

TextMate will look in a few places for Find Window includes and excludes, so check in ~/.tm_properties and [Your Project]/.tm_properties for these excludes;

• exclude
• excludeFiles
• excludeDirectories
• excludeInBrowser
• excludeInFolderSearch
• excludeInFileChooser
• excludeFilesInBrowser
• excludeDirectoriesInBrowser

From dvessel's tm_properties documentation

These are all globs and perhaps a bit arcane. (Note that the glob syntax is documented in the built-in help system.)

The file browser, if it has a file, checks that file against the first key with a value in this order: excludeFilesInBrowser, excludeInBrowser, excludeFiles, exclude. If neither match, it then does the same with include keys, and if one match, it is included.

The default include key is * (so no hidden files, although see the default .tm_properties which include .htaccess and .tm_properties). The default exclude key is the empty string (nothing matches).

The defaults for .tm_properties files are located here: TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/Default.tmProperties

If worse comes to worse, you can reset TextMate to its defaults following this Stack thread