Print a nicely formatted file tree

ps-file-tree.md

Often I'll find it helpful to give a LLM context of my file structure for coding projects, so I co-wrote this script to only grab the relevant files and output them in a nicely formatted tree.

It ignores common directories in a VS code (Nuxt and Vue) project and in a Pycharm (Python) project. It also only grabs files with approved extensions.

Powershell

function Print-Tree {
    param (
        [string]$Path,
        [string]$Indent = ""
    )

    $excluded = @('.nuxt', 'node_modules', '.venv', 'venv', '.idea', '__pycache__')
    $extensions = @(".py", ".txt", ".md", ".ini", ".ts", ".json", ".vue", ".yaml", ".env")

    
    Get-ChildItem -Path $Path | Where-Object { $_.Name -notin $excluded } | ForEach-Object {
        if ($_.PSIsContainer) {
            Write-Output "$Indent|-- $($_.Name)"
            Print-Tree -Path $_.FullName -Indent "$Indent|   "
        } else {                                           # Use this line for all extensions
        # } elseif ($extensions -contains $_.Extension) {  # Use this line to only include whitelisted extensions

            Write-Output "$Indent|-- $($_.Name)"
        }
    }
}

# Call the function with the initial path
Print-Tree -Path "C:\Users\david\source\davehague-site"

Bash

#!/bin/bash

print_tree() {
    local path="$1"
    local indent="$2"
    local excluded=("node_modules" ".nuxt" ".venv" "venv" ".idea" "__pycache__")
    local extensions=("py" "txt" "md" "ini" "ts" "json" "vue" "yaml" "env")

    for item in "$path"/*; do
        local name=$(basename "$item")
        if [[ -d "$item" ]]; then
            if [[ ! " ${excluded[@]} " =~ " $name " ]]; then
                echo "${indent}|-- $name"
                print_tree "$item" "${indent}|   "
            fi
        elif [[ -f "$item" ]]; then
            local ext="${name##*.}"
            # Uncomment the next line to only show whitelisted extensions
            # if [[ " ${extensions[@]} " =~ " $ext " ]]; then
            echo "${indent}|-- $name"
            # fi
        fi
    done
}

# Run the function with the given directory
print_tree "${1:-.}" ""

It's been really helpful to have this script to give the LLM extra context about my project.