Monitor file for changes

lucc / nvimpager

Use nvim as a pager to view manpages, diffs, etc with nvim's syntax highlighting

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Monitor file for changes #21

Closed plurry closed 1 year ago

plurry commented 4 years ago

Is there a way to use nvimpager like less +F or tail -f (or tail -F ideally) to watch log files as they grow?

lucc commented 4 years ago

Such a thing is currently not implemented and not possible. There are some notes about this limitation in the readme under "todo".

Notes for the future

I think a good implementation of a tail -f like functionality should work for equally across real files and pipes.
It would be nice to stream from stdin directly to the nvim instance in nvimpager. This might be dependent on the upstream nvim issues linked in the readme.
How well does nvim's reaload functionality work with keeping the cursor position?

lucc commented 4 years ago

The same is discussed for vimpager: https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager/issues/247

That issue links to an interesting SO answer: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/417939/88313

It might be possible to use the autoread option.

lucc commented 4 years ago

@plurry The following settings in the nvimpager init file might work but only for real files, not for pipes:

set autoread
au CursorHold * checktime

plurry commented 4 years ago

I quickly tried that just now and it didn't seem to work. Anyway, it's not critical for me. I just wanted to make sure I didn't miss some obvious option somewhere.

Thanks. Feel free to close if you'd like.

lucc commented 4 years ago

You might have to set updatetime to a lower value or be more patient :)

An even better solution might be timers as they do not only fire once after the user did something:

set autoread
call timer_start(300, {id -> nvim_command("checktime")}, {"repeat": -1})

midirhee12 commented 3 years ago

@plurry Have you tried running nvimpager in watch or entr. I have no clue if it works, but it is probably worth a try

lucc commented 2 years ago

@cvoges12 The situation we are thinking about here is nvimpager waiting on some more text from a long running pipeline or a long log file that is being appended to. watch restarts the program you give it so it would restart the whole long running pipeline or open the long logfile every n seconds. That is not what one wants.

lucc commented 1 year ago

I have implemented a version of follow mode based on the timer + checktime solution proposed above. It does not handle input via stdin from long running commands though. That is a limitation of nvimpager in general.