BPbpierre·Sep 13, 2024Submission
3 points · Open discussionpaulmillr
chokidar
TypeScript2020–2024
paulmillr / chokidar
chokidar
Minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
12.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-08-12 13:20:54 UTC to 2024-09-13 01:22:46 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcestailwindcss -> chokidar -> braces -> fill-range -> to-regex-range -> is-number
is-number was first published 9 years ago, when these kind of micro-packages were in vogue. braces was added as a dependency to chokidar over 6 years ago [1]. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think the average JS dev today is going out and pulling in these deps.
[1] https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/commit/cbdf25563cfff7f...
In Why Does 'Is-Number' Package Have 59M Weekly Downloads?> It’s typical to listen to this stream of events and use chained if-else statements to determine an action based on the type of the events that occur.
You'd think something like directory watching would have a clear set of events that would make nice objects with consistent meanings, but in my experience file watching gets crazy complicated, and can have all sorts of edge cases.
Just take a looked here for all the various edge cases that crop up: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues
Then you have linux, windows, macos, and maybe you want to abstract over some underlying implementation like chokidar vs fb/watchman vs webpack/watchpack. Every new OS release could also cause things to change. A big leaky abstraction.
So usually its going to be a bunch of if-else statements hacked together to get around edge cases, and have to be rev
Read the rest
isited later on.
Any attempt to abstract this into objects, just obfuscates things. And OO forces you to name things, when in fact they might be un-nameable. `FileSystemModifyEventExceptWhenXAndYAndSometimesZ`.
The behavior might rely on a series of events together, so the object hierarchy must be re-worked.
OO has this rosy idea that we just have to come up with the perfect hierarchy, but things change in unexpected ways, and everything must have a descriptive noun.
I think the barrier to contributing to open-source is far lower than you imagine. There is, for example "good first issue" tag on many repositories (search Google for terms like "awesome for beginners" etc).
One example, I recently contributed to chokidar - something that is used by webpack, VS code, etc - fixing a bug that prevented network path access, and all it took was a conditional statement to handle the edge case: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/pull/1025
In Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?