How to Exclude Folders in PyCharm¶

If you’re using PyCharm to develop, you may have noticed that it has some pretty righteous searching and refactoring capabilities; however, there are likely to be some folders in your project’s directory tree that contain files you don’t want PyCharm to look at when it comes time to search or perform automatic refactoring. Examples of these directories include:

the Python virtual environment (because you definitely don’t want to modify the stuff in there);
the docs directory (because you don’t really need to refactor the stuff in there); and
the lib directory (because nothing in there should depend on the code you’re writing, right?).

There may be others as well.

PyCharm allows you to exclude directories from consideration when searching and refactoring. You can exclude a directory by right-clicking on it and selecting Mark Directory as → Excluded.