How to fix slow refactoring operations in CLion?

There are multiple tweets, posts, and Hackernews comments complaining about the sluggish nature of basic operations in CLion — like renaming a file, renaming a function, and moving a file from one location to another.

The worst part is that this might happen in small-scale projects as well.

Alright, so how do we fix these?

1. Find the (big) generated folders of your CMAKE project — like for eg build/.
2. Right-click → Mark Directory as → Excluded.
3. Do this process for all these generated folders, specific to your project.

Now CLion will exclude this folder for all indexing purposes, making these basic operations (hopefully) much faster.