Configuration, Presets, and Ignore Rules

lsw-config.json

The script looks for this file in the user configuration directory and source/package locations. Missing or invalid JSON falls back to built-in defaults. Recognized values are merged from defaults and ui objects:

{
  "defaults": {
    "type": "html",
    "max_depth": null,
    "parallel": true,
    "parallel_workers": 4,
    "no_browser": false
  },
  "ui": {
    "theme": "dark",
    "show_hidden": false
  }
}

The type, parallel, parallel_workers, theme, and no_browser keys are loaded. max_depth is present in the sample configuration but is not used as the argparse default. show_hidden is currently unused. The parallel settings are parsed but the current scanner does not create a thread pool.

Command-line arguments are parsed after config loading. A preset is then loaded, and values are copied onto the parsed argument namespace only when the current value is None. In practice, argparse defaults such as --type html, --out tree_output.html, and --group none can take precedence over corresponding preset values.

Presets

Presets can live in the user configuration directory, the current directory, or the source/package locations. Each file is named <name>.json and has an args object:

{
  "name": "source-only",
  "description": "Show only source code files",
  "args": {
    "ext": ".py,.js,.ts",
    "ignore_pattern": "*.min.*,*.compiled.*",
    "type": "html"
  }
}

Run a preset with:

python lsw.py --preset source-only --path .

The name and description fields are informational. Only args is applied. Available preset names are shown in the --help text.

.lswignore

The script looks for .lswignore in this order:

1. The scanned directory, allowing each application or project to provide its own rules.
2. The current working directory.
3. The user configuration directory: %APPDATA%\\lsw on Windows or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lsw on other systems.
4. The directory containing lsw.py, which is useful for a source checkout.
5. The Python environment prefix, where the packaged fallback is installed by pip.

The first existing file wins. Blank lines and lines beginning with # are ignored. Ordinary lines are fnmatch glob patterns. Lines beginning with ^ or | are compiled as regular expressions.

User configuration

On first run, LSW creates this directory without overwriting files that already exist:

%APPDATA%\\lsw\\
  lsw-config.json
  .lswignore
  lsw-presets\\

The bundled defaults and presets are copied there so developers can edit them once and reuse them while scanning many unrelated folders. A .lswignore in the scanned folder or current working directory still takes precedence.

Example:

node_modules
*.pyc
^test_.*

Ignore rules are matched against the entry name, not a normalized full relative path. Invalid regex lines in .lswignore are silently skipped. CLI ignore patterns and regexes are added to the loaded rules.

The repository's sample file excludes version-control directories, build output, caches, logs, and common editor artifacts.