Reflect External File Changes #2075
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thecoolwinter
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Jul 10, 2025
### Description Implements editor restoration, helping ease the user experience for longer editing tasks spanning multiple files. Users expect opened tabs to retain the scroll position, cursors, and undo stack. To facilitate this, we receive a stream of state updates from the editor and save them to a SQLite DB. When a file is opened again, the state is restored from that DB. Ideally this is transparent to the user. However, there is one very slight UX flaw that this doesn't address: highlighting. When a user restores an editor there can be a flash as the highlighter works to do syntax highlighting on the newly opened editor. Some potential future directions: - The text storage object that outlives editors does retain color information, if we could avoid wiping that color information when an editor is loaded we could avoid that slight delay. - To do that, we need to store that state with the storage object somehow. Either through a custom text attribute (could be finicky) or maybe by subclassing NSTextStorage and adding a flag. > [!NOTE] > This includes a mechanism for sharing undo stacks for editors during a workspace's lifetime. As @austincondiff mentioned on discord, it should add a undo frame when a file is updated externally. This PR notably does not include that change. I'll be adding it in #2075 ### Related Issues * closes #2057 ### Checklist - [x] I read and understood the [contributing guide](https://github.com/CodeEditApp/CodeEdit/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) as well as the [code of conduct](https://github.com/CodeEditApp/CodeEdit/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) - [x] The issues this PR addresses are related to each other - [x] My changes generate no new warnings - [x] My code builds and runs on my machine - [x] My changes are all related to the related issue above - [x] I documented my code ### Screenshots https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6a9ff5ea-743e-4183-83c9-b774915b0c35
thecoolwinter
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austincondiff,
0xWDG,
matthijseikelenboom,
FastestMolasses and
tom-ludwig
austincondiff
approved these changes
Jul 11, 2025
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Description
Implements reflecting external changes in open files. If a file has no unsaved changes, and is notified that the contents changed, it reloads the contents.
NSDocumentalready handles asking the user if they want to overwrite the contents of the file or use the disk version if the user attempts to save to a file that has been updated since they edited the file.When a successful reload happens, the
CodeFileDocumentwill also register a new undo frame with the new contents. This allows the user to undo changes that are reflected in the editor.When a file is updated externally and there are no open editors, the cached undo stack is cleared.
Detailed changes:
CodeFileDocument.presentedItemDidChangeto handle notifications about file changes.isDocumentEditedis false, we block the calling thread and reload the document.CodeFileDocument.read, we check to see if the file has already been read into theNSTextStorageobject.CodeFileDocuments intoCEWorkspaceFile. Previously it was in a few different places.UndoManagerRestorationto receive file system events. It uses these to invalidate undo stacks where necessary.CodeFileViewto use the file document's object ID as SwiftUI's identifier. This fixed a bug where a document was sometimes 'cached' by the document controller and meant SwiftUI didn't load up a new view for the new document. This ID is stable while a file is open in an editor.CodeFileDocumentthat were causing the file to not reload when it was closed and opened again.EditorLayout+StateRestoration.swiftare all related to this.[weak codeFile]are similarly related.Related Issues
Checklist
Screenshots
Demo of new behavior. I first undo modifications to the open file, then make some modifications. The changes are added to the current undo stack. I cause a lint again and then undo all the changes and close the file. I then make more external changes (invalidating the undo stack) and open the file, where Command-Z no longer has any effect because of the changes that happened while the file wasn't opened.
CodeEdit.-.Reflect.External.Changes.Demo.Long.mp4