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IME has broken on terminal since I turn back to sway, had to use English on this article.

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Things start as I found rathole has a weird implementation on their config hot-reload.

After I made a pr, developer point to another issue which explained this is a workaround specifically for vim, which not fired modify inotify event during modifying.

Let's make an experiment:

Create ./t, then touch file a:

mkdir t
cd t
touch a

We have full control to this dir recursively. Then make a inotify watch continuedly:

nix-shell -p inotify-tools

inotifywatch -v -z -t 10 -r t/a

This will watch the inotify event on file a in 10s.

We took some actions:

cd t
vim a
# wirte something

:wq

see what cautch:

~ ❄️  impure  36s
> inotifywatch -v -z -t 10 -r t/a

Establishing watches...
Setting up watch(es) on t/a
OK, t/a is now being watched.
Total of 1 watches.
Finished establishing watches, now collecting statistics.
Will listen for events for 10 seconds.
total  access  modify  attrib  close_write  close_nowrite  open  moved_from  moved_to  move_self  create  delete  delete_self  filename
9      1       0       1       0            2              2     0           0         1          0       0       1            t/a

No modify event, but expect to have that:

echo "test" >> a

This action fired modify event successfully as expected:

~ ❄️  impure  6m37s
> inotifywatch -v -z -t 3 -r t/a

Establishing watches...
Setting up watch(es) on t/a
OK, t/a is now being watched.
Total of 1 watches.
Finished establishing watches, now collecting statistics.
Will listen for events for 3 seconds.
total  access  modify  attrib  close_write  close_nowrite  open  moved_from  moved_to  move_self  create  delete  delete_self  filename
3      0       1       0       1            0              1     0           0         0          0       0       0            t/a

Take sight back to result of vim modified, here is a move_self event, as this article mentioned, vim default set backupcopy=no, which caused behaviors that the original file is renamed to create a backup and a new file with the original name is created. This would not trigger the modify event but the close_write of parent directory and move_self of itself.

Turn this option to yes means to copy the file to create a backup and then overwrite the original, thus inotify will trigger.

Under my test only vim has this problem, nano and helix both trigger the event normally.

Is there a more graceful way to watch the file change modified by vim ?