But using patterns allows the plugin to autoselect which projects to disable since it can distinguish between project1_dir/remote (which is the slow remote mount) and project2_dir/local (which is fast local storage).
But I think the problem (if I understand it correctly) is, that when you have a project `foo` which contains only remote directories and files (imagine something like e.g. Geany's root project directories and files), you don't want even to list the files inside `foo` and ignore it completely before anything gets loaded. But one can overcome it by creating the Geany project one directory above so `foo` becomes a single directory of the project and can get ignored as a whole.