Sublime Forum

Feature request for Sublime Merge: automatic refreshes

#1

Hi,

I just started trying out Sublime Merge and so far I really like it! I do have one small annoyance, though: whenever I edit a file (e.g. with Sublime Text) I have to manually press CTRL+R in order for Sublime Merge to notice the changes, which I tend to forget to do.

Therefore, I would like to suggest making Sublime merge refresh automatically whenever a file is changed (or whenever the window receives focus). This could be achieved by a filesystem watcher like inotify or by simple polling. I think this would be a nice, small but simple UI improvement.

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#2

it normally refreshes automatically for me, I believe it already uses a file system watcher. What OS platform are you on? you may need to tweak some inotify limits for a better experience on many Linux distros, for example, depending on the projects you work with and other software watching for file changes

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#3

I was actually using it on Windows (but named inotify as an example because I forgot what the Windows equivalent was called). Is this supposed to work on Windows as well?

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#4

I’ve never noticed an issue with SM not being updated on Windows. In fact, I didn’t know CTRL+R was a thing until you mentioned it. Of course, just anecdotal, so that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.

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#5

Where are the projects located? Most people reporting issues with file notifications not working use quite sophisticated project structures on network drives or sshfs mounts etc.

The autorefreshing requires the filesystem to be able to send proper change notifications. Some of the network filesystems don’t to so.

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#6

Ah, of course! I just realised the drive my project is located on is actually a network share. It wouldn’t surprise me if SMB simply does not support filesystem events.

In that case it’s pretty understandable that auto-updating doesn’t work. I should just move my local copy to a local disk.

I guess in the particular case that filesystem watching does not work a polling mechanism could be used instead (perhaps whenever the winodw is moved into focus), but I’m not sure that would be worth the trouble or possible performance issues.

Either way, this threat can be closed. Thanks for the quick responses!

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#7

Enumerating a large set of files takes a while, so polling seems quite inefficient and may probably cause heavy file system activity especially with large projects. Some people reported about projects of >3GB of size with hundreds of millions of files. I doupt polling would result in a sattisfying user experience on slow network drives then.

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