What are non-project files?

Nothing. This scope is used for File Colors highlighting; unfortunately we don't have a way to hide it from the project view, even though it's useless there.

I do not appear to have a non-project scope, but the files in non-project scope appear in all scopes. Is there a way to exclude non-project files from a custom scope?

For CLion I found that I had to manually edit the scope string to exclude out of project paths (IE: Python global site packages) from being included in search results since the custom scope GUI only shows paths which are inside the project.

@Nthexwn how did you do that?

@ksai1

1. Control+shift+f to open find window
2. Alt+s to select scope view
3. Shift+enter to open scopes window
4. Click '+' in upper left
5. Select 'local' to create a scope which only your current project can use or 'shared' to define a scope which other projects can use
6. Give it a name (IE: 'Exclude global packages')
7. Observe the syntax in the 'pattern' field by experimentally selecting folders within your project and clicking the 'exclude' and 'exclude recursively' buttons
8. Once you understand the syntax add or modify paths in the 'pattern' field to exclude directories outside of your project (IE: '../../../../usr/local/bin/python')