How to make Textmate open 10x faster for larger projects

I’ve noticed Textmate slowing down a lot for a few larger projects, often beach-balling for 10+ seconds before opening. This turns out to be because it is re-indexing all the assets symlinked in the public directory, like Paperclip and Attachment-Fu uploads.

Excluding unwanted directories in Textmate turns out to be pretty easy, but it’s not very intuitive how to do it for existing projects (you can’t do it globally for pre-existing projects by going to Preferences » Advanced).

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your project and highlight the root directory in the drawer, then click the info icon:

2. Put this in the box labeled “Folder Pattern”, separating the system directory and other folders you want excluded from public with pipes:

!.*/(.[^/]*|public/(system|otherfolders)|CVS|_darcs|_MTN|\{arch\}|blib|.*~.nib|.*.(framework|app|pbproj|pbxproj|xcode(proj)?|bundle))$

That’s it! For an additional boost, you can add Remate, but I haven’t had any need for it after excluding these directories.