Use fs.watch if possible about watch HOT 10 CLOSED

Checkout my library sane which does exactly what you're talking about. Uses fs.watch and can be put into polling mode to use this library.

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I just tested a little bit and I want to watch 177958 files on mac which looks to be problematic. It looks like your library does not work around that.

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I'm not sure why this got closed. fs.watch is still better than fs.watchFile (although, as it looks, less reliable).

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Yeah, this mikeal/watch library is nice but its really slow sometimes. Takes up to like 3 seconds to notice changes.

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@OscarGodson in my experience that's mostly on Mac and is actually at the kernel/filesystem layer and can't be fixed in Node.

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@mikeal thats what Ive been told, but watchify is next to instant to notice changes and so is Grunt's watch task (I'm not using Grunt but tried it to check how fast it was). Also, I tried @amasad's sane library and thats also instant as well.

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very strange. well, PR welcome then I guess :)

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The reason I like this library a lot is that it doesn't use fs.watch.

fs.watch isn't compatible across OS's (because it relies on native OS APIs).

Example: When you save files in vim on OSX, the original file is replaced by a swap file. fs.watchFile detects this as a file change, while fs.watch detects this as a file being deleted and a new file being created.

That said, fs.watch is definitely a lot faster.

I definitely don't think we should remove fs.watchFile support entirely, but perhaps add support for both.

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@paton through a lib you can not trigger changes on swp files. You'd normally do something like check if the file ends in .js or something before triggering the callback. sane does it like this

var watcher = sane('path/to/dir', ['**/*.js', '**/*.css']);

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@OscarGodson That doesn't fix the problem. To clarify: when saving example.js, fs.watch thinks that I entirely deleted the file, and then created a brand new file, which isn't the case. This happens even when filtering out swp files.

This can be problematic when you have callbacks you want to trigger only when a new file is really created (and not simply overwritten by a swp file)

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