Watch external file modifications

[kosiakk]

I'd like to edit the file outside of Pluto and see the changes reflected in the Web UI. It is especially tempting

Use-cases:

• External editors like VS Code if the notebook is incuded into another program due to its awesome simple file format.
• Changing Git branch.
• Two Pluto instances opening the same file unexpectedly.

Currently Pluto simply overwrites the file with an in-memory copy, not even checking that there is a conflict.

I guess, FileWatching.poll_file can help. In this case we might parse that new version of the file (as in Open) and try resucing computed results for the cells with the same ID and exactly the same contents. The rest can be deemed modified and will re-compute upon Ctrl-S

[Moelf]

up vote for this one since pluto notebook is just a .jl this is very nice to have when you have to, say, rename/edit a long function from vim or something.

[fonsp]

#240

[pleiby]

Seeking easy way to manually reload Pluto .jl file from disk

#240 calls for automatic reload whenever the file is changed on disk, but even that it would be beneficial if
the user could easily manually reload from file. That would address the two use cases which are necessitated by
other intentional user activity:

• after user edits of the .jl file with a text editor (e.g. refactoring, global search and replace, fast moves, block deletes, etc)
• after source code updated on disk from a Git branch or pull

As it stands, even the following steps fail to read the updated code from the file.

• backing up with the browser (<-) and
• then typing the file path in the New session: Open from File dialog box
  Rather it uses some cached version of the file in memory.

Thanks for Pluto!

[Moelf]

@pleiby #240 (comment) that's I thought too, haven't got around it but it's still in my mind