watchdog

> A lot of developers really seem to prefer janky, undermaintained third party libraries with huge APIs over a quick home made hack to solve exactly the problem your team has Sometimes it’s not even that they’re janky and undermaintained, it’s just the huge and unnecessary API. A good example is watching for file changes. inotify has been around forever, and is easy to reason about. The Python library inotify_simple [0] just wraps that. That’s it. It works extremely well, has no dependencies of its own, and provides nothing else. I once needed this functionality for a project, and had another teammate argue we should use watchdog [1] instead, because it had more stars, and more frequent commits. It took me longer than I thought it would to explain that sometimes, projects are complete and don’t need commits, and that we didn’t need or wan

Also not to be confused with watchdog and it's command watchmedo, which is what I thought this was when I first read the headline. I don't know what the differences are, but I use watchdog to restart my local celery workers when I make changes. It's scripted out so I don't ever use the command directly. https://pypi.org/project/watchdog/ https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog EDIT: Now I'm wondering how often I miss out on something because I confuse it for something I already use. Maybe there is room for a "things I use" or "things I know about" browser plugin.

A well-written Python app using the respective platform's native events through say, watchdog[1] performs perfectly fine for huge numbers of files[t]. The language used isn't at all the problem with Dropbox's performance which has been a problem for as long as they've had a desktop app. If there's one specific bottleneck (ex: hashing files) then that's a prime candidate for Cython[2] or the plain CPython C-API. Even when you have dropbox restricted to a small folder with _no IO events at all_ it's still constantly working, which is the real problem and entirely an optimization/design problem. [1]: https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog [2]: https://cython.org/ [3]: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/index.html [t]: ... except when forced to use kqueue or polling

Though it looks like unmaintained, I use watchdog[1] for automatically running build and test commands on file change. [1] https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog

entr is is what I eventually settled on after years of searching the perfect utility to build/run tests after file changes. After using gulp, grunt, watching_testrunner (which I eventually inherited maintainership of), watchman, watchdog (https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog), sniffer (https://github.com/jeffh/sniffer) entr is cross-platform on OS X, linux and BSD. watching_testrunner has no BSD support watchman is way too big and not domain specific enough to my needs sniffer worked quite well but it required having a scent.py file everywhere entr keeps it all in a neat, unix like package you can pipe files to. I keep some example usage in my book, The Tao of tmux at https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read#leanpub-auto-file-w.... In this section I demonstrate my workflow with entr(1) in a Makefile. The code I use in the example shou

Pretty neat! As a suggestion, I would replace also the delimiters "()\{\}[]" with the corresponding left/right versions [1] so LaTeX adjusts automatically the size in the output and I don't have to deal with less readable code missing \left or \right errors. As another tip to make LaTeX typesetting easier, I'd recommend using a custom keyboard distribution to input symbols easily, (e.g., alt + d for δ instead of \delta). In TeX.sx Jon Wickerson published [2] a layout for the british keyboard and the corresponding package to make LaTeX understand the unicode symbols. If you happen to have a spanish keyboard, I made an adaptation of that code [3]. And another thing: if you plan on using pretex a lot, it may be useful to parse the file on save (maybe before compilation). inotify-tools [4] or watchdog (OS X) [5] can help you, it's easy to cre

The watchdog library is great for this. It comes with an API and a command line tool: https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog Compatibility: Linux 2.6 (inotify) Mac OS X (FSEvents, kqueue) FreeBSD/BSD (kqueue) Windows (ReadDirectoryChangesW with I/O completion ports; ReadDirectoryChangesW worker threads) OS-independent (polling the disk for directory snapshots and comparing them periodically; slow and not recommended)