Keep having to turn follow on

[BergQuester]

Issue Type: Bug

The follow feature regularly stops following the selected participant. I keep having to tell it to follow again.

Extension version: 0.3.504
VS Code version: Code 1.25.1 (1dfc5e557209371715f655691b1235b6b26a06be, 2018-07-11T15:33:29.235Z)
OS version: Darwin x64 17.7.0

System Info

Item	Value
CPUs	Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7820HQ CPU @ 2.90GHz (8 x 2900)
GPU Status	2d_canvas: enabled flash_3d: enabled flash_stage3d: enabled flash_stage3d_baseline: enabled gpu_compositing: enabled multiple_raster_threads: enabled_on native_gpu_memory_buffers: enabled rasterization: enabled video_decode: enabled video_encode: enabled vpx_decode: enabled webgl: enabled webgl2: enabled
Load (avg)	2, 3, 3
Memory (System)	16.00GB (0.05GB free)
Process Argv	/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron
Screen Reader	no
VM	0%

[lostintangent]

@BergQuester Hey! Thanks for this feedback. Currently, follow mode is auto-disabled in three cases:

1. You start editing a file

2. You close the file that is currently active for the person you’re following

3. You occlude (put into the background) the file that is currently active for the person you’re following. The “occlude” distinction here is key, since you can be following someone in an editor group that is beside another editor group that you’re actively coding in. In order to allow “passively” following someone in this way, we only break the follow when the “followee’s” active file is no longer visible (I.e. because you moved on to another file to work on your own)

Any other gesture (making a text selection, scrolling, doing a “peek definition”) won’t currently break the follow, based on the assumption they aren’t strong enough indications that you intend to start working independently.

Our currently assumption (which could be wrong!) is that #2 and #3 above still make sense as inidicators to break follow mode. However, we have discussed removing #1, so that you can follow someone and still make minor edits in the code, as you navigate along with them.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this behavior, and whether any of the three events above are responsible for your need to keep re-enabling follow mode. This is one of our most critical features, so we need more feedback to make sure we get it right 😁

[BergQuester]

@lostintangent thanks for the reply!

Your description of how it is supposed to work makes perfect sense to me.

However, I'm experiencing disabling of follows while I am simply using live share as a viewer for my pair's work while we discuss what's going on in the code. I'm not trying to edit or navigate the project on my own. It even seems to happen when I'm interacting with a web page on another screen.

I suppose it's possible that I'm accidentally triggering one of the auto-disable cases somehow. Is there any way to log when follow is auto-disabled and the reason?

[lostintangent]

@BergQuester Hmm OK that sounds like a bug. We'll look into this today and see if we can figure out what may be going on. Just to confirm: you're following another user, and then switching to a separate app, on a separate monitor. And then at some point, the follow is being "broken"? That isn't intended, so we need to fix that. Thanks for reporting this, and stay tuned 👍

// CC @grork

[BergQuester]

@lostintangent Yes, that is just the one case that I did catch. I cannot say that is what is going on in all cases where the follow is being broken. Most of the time I'm looking away from the editor for some variable amount of time and when I look back at the editor I have to turn following back on again.

I realize the conditions are rather vague at this point, so if you have trouble tracking it down let me know what I can do to help.

[ebbhead]

@lostintangent Hi, I'm having the same issue as @BergQuester. When using live share (and being the host) and simply following and viewing, not touching anything on my computer, I suddenly unfollow and have to follow again.

[grork]

@ebbhead What OS are you using -- Linux, Mac, Windows?

[ebbhead]

@grork Im on MacOS.

[lostintangent]

@BergQuester @ebbhead This should now be resolved in the latest Live Share release. If you could update to the latest extension version, and let us know how it goes, that would be awesome. Thanks!

[ebbhead]

@lostintangent I've been live sharing for a couple of hours now and no unwanted unfollowing has occured. Thank you!

[lostintangent]

@ebbhead Awesome! In that case, I’ll close this as resolved, but please let us know if the problem reappears. Thanks!