Live Updates and Conflicts

Live Updates and Conflicts

This is the feature the editor is named for. While a document is open, its file is watched. If anything else changes it — a colleague on a shared drive, a script, a Git checkout, an AI assistant — the editor notices immediately.

What happens next depends on whether you have unsaved changes.

No unsaved changes: it reloads, and shows you what moved

The document reloads, and the paragraphs the other writer touched are briefly shaded. Where something was deleted, a thin rule marks the seam it left behind. After a couple of seconds the shading fades on its own.

The point is that an edit made by someone else is something you can see rather than something that lands invisibly while you are reading.

Two deliberate choices:

• The shading is per block, not per section. A one-word change lighting up a whole page would read as noise, not information.
• Your cursor and your scroll position do not move. The reload was somebody else's action; taking your place away mid-read is not something you asked for.

Unsaved changes: you are asked

If the file changes on disk while you have unsaved edits, the two versions have diverged and neither is thrown away without you saying so. A bar appears above the document:

Button	What it does
View difference	Shows your unsaved version against the one on disk. Press it again to hide it.
Keep my edits	Dismisses the change on disk. Your document is untouched and still unsaved.
Reload from disk	Discards your unsaved edits and loads the file's version.

View difference lists every line of both sides. Lines only in your unsaved version are marked −, lines only in the file on disk are marked +, and unchanged lines are shown for context. Looking at the difference changes nothing — it is a view, and the two buttons beside it stay available while it is open.

Changes that are not really changes

Two situations that look like changes but are not, and which the editor deliberately stays quiet about:

• Your own save. Saving writes the file, which the watcher sees. That is not an external change.
• A restyle. Another tool rewriting Setext headings as # headings, or _italic_ as *italic*, changes the file's bytes without changing what it says. No conflict is raised and no reload happens.

The test is meaning, not bytes: if a change would make no difference to your document, it does not interrupt you.

One thing that follows from this: the difference view compares meaning too. A line it shows as unchanged may still differ byte-for-byte on disk, and the difference is not a prediction of exactly what a save would write.

Working alongside an AI assistant

Point an assistant at the same file you have open and you can watch it work: each change it writes reloads into your document with the touched paragraphs briefly shaded. If you were mid-edit when it wrote, the conflict bar lets you compare the two versions before choosing.

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• Getting Started
• Files, Folders and Tabs