Doco update req: ignore vs filter

[japgolly]

Could somebody please update the doco to clarify the difference between ignore and filter?
It's unclear and filtering out and ignoring sounds like the same thing to me.

[rymai]

I think ignore is useful for ignoring specific folders (e.g. tmp, logs etc...) while filter is useful to narrow down the files to watch, usually by giving extension patterns (e.g. \.rb$).

Note that the two methods are complementary. For instance you could filter /\.rb$/ files and ignore /lib\/foo/ in which you could have .rb files.

[japgolly]

Ahhh right, so to put it simply ignore is for directories and filter is for files. Is that right?

[rymai]

Hum, most of the time that's indeed the use case in practice, but I think you could ignore files and filter directories. @Maher4Ever do you confirm that?

[Maher4Ever]

The ignore method can be used to exclude a file or a directory from the set of files being watched. Let's say you have used the watch method to monitor a directory but you are not interested in changes happening to images, you could use the ignore method to exclude them.

The filter method has a different purpose. It can be used to focus on, or rather filter the important files and directories without having to specify them by hand in the watch method. If you are watching multiple directories but only interested in changes to the ruby files, use the filter method.

As @rymai said above, both of them can be used for files and directories.

[rymai]

Thanks @Maher4Ever! Should we update the Listen's README with these clarifications?

[Maher4Ever]

Yeah, I guess that should be done to stop confusing more people.

[japgolly]

Thanks guys. ignore sounds very straightforward.
Let me just clarify again - so if I'm understanding you correctly then when watch is called to watch a directory (with no filename provided), filter specifies a regex that all files in that directory must match in order to be further processed (with non-matching files being ignored).

[rymai]

Yep I think you got it right!

[japgolly]

Ok sweet. Thanks for the time explaining it to me guys!

I'll leave the issue open as a reminder to give the README some extra love. Just close whenever; don't mind me :)