I've been looking into the file/directory scanning/watching in Lite-XL and I understand why things are done this way. But I've a suggestion to make, perhaps as a new config option.

When Lite-XL is launched with a specific file to load, it usually starts to scan that file's folder for all files, etc. The default limit is 2000 files. Now, if this happens to be a file on a network folder, or a slow USB drive, or some mounted folder from GDrive or Samba/NFS/etc etc etc, and if there were a lot of files/subdirs, it could take a user-noticable delay before the main UI is ready.

Regretfully, setting the max files to a small number (eg. 10) does not speed up this process because the directory listing and traversal (over the network) would have already been issued and Lite-XL will wait for the full reply before noticing that oops, there are more than 10 items in the list. This is especially true if the folder happens to have many files - for example, 1000 *.log files..

To reproduce, just have a large folder and many files in a network path and lite-xl <network-path/some-file>

I'd like to suggest that IF Treeview is hidden (via, plugin/setting/etc), then defer the file/dir scan until later. I believe dirwatch will automatically execute .. later, right? Not only that, if I hit open-file later, the file listing is re-populated anyway.

In this way, we achieve two things:

1. UI response is much faster when launching Lite-XL with a file from a network path
2. We don't hit the network server/USB device with both a file open+read and a directory traversal request at the same time (or back to back)

Of course, if someone loaded the network file, and then show Treeview, or hit open-file or find-file immediately after, then sure, it should have a delay until the traversal / loading of file information into memory is complete. But I feel that's fine because the user explicitly forced a directory traversal.

Now I suggest this to be an option because how would Lite-XL know that the file resides in a network path anyway? Hence, it's an option for users who have to deal with many files in a large directory structure to speed up the time to launch and start editing.

Yes, of course, one can simply tweak their workflow and not put so many files in one folder structure, or copy stuff to a local drive first etc. But I thought I should at least ask this question and put the suggestion out there. What do you think?