What triggers workspace.onDidChangeTextDocument?

[worksofliam]

Hi!

I am wondering what triggers workspace.onDidChangeTextDocument? Of course, a user saving a file would trigger it, but what if I use git to discard changes against a file (or many files) - will that also trigger it?

Thanks!

[alefragnani]

Hi @worksofliam ,

Based on its documentation (https://code.visualstudio.com/api/references/vscode-api) it says:

An event that is emitted when a text document is changed. This usually happens when the contents changes but also when other things like the dirty-state changes.

I would expand this description with a few scenarios: It is triggered when:

• When the user types something
• When Undo and Redo are fired
• When Save is fired
• When Formatters are fired

And yes, also when discarding changes with Git

Hope this helps

[worksofliam]

Thanks! It does. I appreciate it.

[alefragnani]

That's great to hear!

Please, if you don't mind, mark the answer as accepted, so other users looking for the similar questions will know there is an answer here.

Thank you

[r3m0t]

TextDocument.contents is "what should the text editor show for this file".

VS Code watches files and updates its view of their contents even when an external program runs like git restore, but if the file is dirty (user has unsaved edits in VSCode), this doesn't happen immediately because it only has one TextDocument.contents and the user's input is the most important version. (A notification shows up on save instead).

Also, if the document doesn't have an editor open, there might not be a TextDocument object for that filename.