API: Support glob pattern "**/!(*.min).js" for file watchers

[TheColorRed]

I am trying to write an extension, and I am wondering how I can take this pattern:

glob(vscode.workspace.rootPath + '/**/!(*.min).js', (err, files) => {
    console.log(files);
})

And use it here:

let watcher = vscode.workspace.createFileSystemWatcher('**/!(*.min).js', true, false, true);

It seems as if the !(*.min) is not supported. It would be nice if either:

A !() was supported
OR
B There is another parameter for ignoring files similar to vscode.workspace.findFiles()

[bpasero]

Our glob patterns currently do not support negation.

[jpike88]

What do they support then? There is nothing in your documentation about how they're supposed to work. If they don't support something as fundamental to pattern matching as a negation operator, that needs to be far more obvious whether it be in the program, or in documentation.

[Xunnamius]

+1 on this, was wondering why my standard globs weren't working

[TheColorRed]

@jpike88 and @Xunnamius It looks like they have added it to the docs: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensionAPI/vscode-api#GlobPattern

[Jma353]

Is there going to be future support for negation?

E.g. I have a situation where I want a language client (which also uses VS Code APIs to match file globs) to conditionally send LSP traffic to a server, based on where the document that's involved lives in the file-system. See this code pointer.

I would like to exclude certain subdirectories from my glob. Currently, to my understanding, I can't do this, unless I use per-character negation (as the vscode documentation indicates is supported), to do something like is mentioned in the following comment.

[Jma353]

cc: @bpasero

[kimprice]

What is the status on this issue? It would be very helpful to be able to exclude certain folders and files from the file watcher. I agree that having another parameter to specify exclusions would be one nice solution.

[matulek]

Well, please reconsider. I've got a case where I need to exclude node_modules from source map lookups, but I've got my own module that I'm developing and this one needs to not be excluded. I think that it's a valid case and inability to negate path fragment from outFiles and resolveSourceMapLocations prevents from doing that. @bpasero