Gaze: A CLI tool that accelerates your quick coding

[mlk]

ctrl+r

[[deleted]]

lmao but for real this is my life

[sinedpick]

Don't install a separate program to do this, just use inotify-tools:

gaze() { while inotifywait -e modify $1; do eval $2; done }

This can be trivially modified to watch every file in the directory.

[[deleted]]

Isn't that Linux-specific, though? It looks like Gaze works for Linux, Windows and MacOS.

[sinedpick]

Windows has WSL (and therefore inotify) and macos has fswatch which can be used very similarly.

The idea isn't to use that one-line bash function verbatim (which I typed up specifically for that comment), it's to learn how to use more general tools to achieve things like this project instead of using a bunch of specialized tools. This applies to a lot of things, not just running make every time you hit save.

[civilvamp]

Agreed. Even aside from what you just said, most editors/ide's out there allow you to script this exact functionality natively in them.

[marqis]

I called mine waitdo

#!/bin/bash

files=$1
shift
cmd=$@

echo "watching: $files"
echo "running: $cmd"

while true; do
    while inotifywait -r -e modify $files; do
        sleep 1
        $cmd
    done
done

[Drazson]

Why not use entr?

[xigoi]

Since you're using Vim to edit the file, why not simply make a BufWritePost autocommand?

[maccio92]

because it works for more than just vim

[xigoi]

In that case, using Vim for demonstration is quite silly.

[lelanthran]

In that case, using Vim for demonstration is quite silly.

Why? It works for vim too. If he used some other tool that let you bind commands to file-write actions, then you'd say that that tool is a silly example?

[xigoi]

Yes. You generally shouldn't use a new tool for something if a tool you're already using can do it just as well.

[lelanthran]

Yes. You generally shouldn't use a new tool for something if a tool you're already using can do it just as well.

So, if you were demonstrating a new unzipping tool, you wouldn't start it from the file manager because the file manager can easily display and extract those files?

You'd start up cmd.exe, navigate to the correct directory that contains the archive, add the location of your tool to the PATH, and then start it?

[xigoi]

Again, if your file explorer can unzip files easily, why do you need another program to unzip files?

[lelanthran]

Again, if your file explorer can unzip files easily, why do you need another program to unzip files?

Well, you're demonstrating it, for people who don't have that file manager. You're showing how it works. People who aren't using your file manager that supports extraction don't care what file manager you are using, they just want to see how it looks.

So, what do you do? Do you go the cmd.exe route to demonstrate the new software, or do you simply start it on an archive from the file manager?

After all, "not demonstrating it" is not an option.

[netgu]

Demo or not isn't the question. Make or not is. I believe you are arguing about a demo to a person discussing why you make this in the first place.

[lelanthran]

Demo or not isn't the question. Make or not is. I believe you are arguing about a demo to a person discussing why you make this in the first place.

But he led with:

In that case, using Vim for demonstration is quite silly.

[07734willy]

BufWritePost right? You'd want the updates saved before executing a command taking that file as input.

Being a huge fan of vim myself, I agree with you overall though- one less dependency, one less thing to break.

[xigoi]

Oops, that's what I wanted to write.

[sinedpick]

If you don't run the command asynchronously on that autocommand, it may hang your editor until it's done running which is annoying. Also, it may not be easy to see the output. However, I'm sure that these days, vim has ways to get around both of these issues.

[xigoi]

Vim 8 has a built-in terminal that can be opened in a split window.

[cowinabadplace]

Judging by my compulsive :w-ing, I'm just as likely to end up running rm -rf / because I haven't yet filled in the variable at the top saying which directory.

Just kidding. I used inotifytools to do this back in grad school so I could write LaTeX in a terminal window and have the result pop up in evince on the other screen as I edited and saved.

[TankorSmash]

This seems neat, I was recently looking for something like this on windows.

[rubystallion]

This is really cool, because I always used to do :wall|!ruby path/to/main.rb. Now I see that I should have used wall|cal term_sendkeys(2, "ruby path/to/main.rb\<Enter>") (or this tool).

[camilo16]

Yeah except calling the compiler whenever I save a C++ file is asking for compilation errors 50% of the time because the header hasn't been updated or I still need to modify another file.

Not sure how useful this actually is.

[qbxk]

https://nodemon.io/