File watcher breaks when using Helix editor

[LatjoLajbin]

Running d2 with filewatching breaks as soon as a save is performed, as helix creates and removes a backup file in case of crashes.

Found a similar report in the discord where the user was prompted to make a github issue, but I'm making this since I couldn't seem to find one.

OS: Windows
Shell: PowerShell
Editor: Helix
Installed via: Scoop (v0.6.7)

Wondering if this is related to the 16 milliseconds of event catching in d2cli/watch.go? It feels weird that it's receiving the file system event REMOVE and then immediately tries to ensure that it's being filewatched.

There's a discussion in the helix repo regarding a similar issue in Hugo, where it was solved in Hugo by adding .bck files as file type exceptions.

helix-editor/helix#11715
gohugoio/hugo#12856

[alixander]

oo interesting, thanks for the legwork researching this

[alixander]

i installed helix and tried to reproduce but could not. is there a setting you're using to turn on backup files?

Kapture.2024-10-01.at.12.42.50.mp4

[LatjoLajbin]

Not really, no. if I read it right, the error shows up in os.Stat(path) [go.watch:356]. Does powershell do something different than zsh when trying to find a file? I don't have wsl setup right now to test with on the same machine...

I only found out about the backup file writing through this issue, but my understanding is that it's a baseline for most editors that safeguards against file corruption if the editor crashes during write.

[alixander]

i think related to #9

I wonder if this issue is circumvented if we just do atomic writes

[alixander]

Let's see in the next version if this still is an issue: #2141

[LatjoLajbin]

Following up on this to say that I am still having the same issue. Any idea of something I could try to bypass it?

[alixander]

@LatjoLajbin Thank you for the swift followup. I just have to confirm, d2 version prints 0.6.8?

[LatjoLajbin]

Yes, confirmed. Also tried building from source before this release but didn't yet step through sequentially or anything