Change watch reload command from Return key

[lorefnon]

Feature request

Thanks for developing and maintaining this library. Would you be open to adding a flag to disable the restart on return behavior when running in watch mode ?

Why?

When server generates a lot of logs, I often use returns to create a visual gap between past output and next output before performing some action so that it is easier to see eg. what all db queries were executed as part of a specific request handling.

I don't mind manually restarting through Ctrl+c ctrl+p enter but every now and then I find myself accidentally restarting server when trying to add some vertical space in console output out of muscle memory.

[privatenumber]

Does tsx watch --clear-screen=false work for you? (from https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx/pull/23)

[lorefnon]

This is not quite what I wanted though - it prevents the screen from clearing up which is good, but it still restarts the server which I don't want to happen.

I am proposing a similar flag which prevents the restart as well.

[nirajsavaika]

I also find this behavior non intuitive. I have attempted to address this in https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx/pull/220.

[privatenumber]

Instead of disabling it completely, I prefer to change it so there's a better way to trigger a reload manually. Do you know what nodemon does?

[lorefnon]

nodemon supports rs<enter> for restarting the server.

[privatenumber]

Typing in multiple characters as a command seems confusing to me and would interfere with stdin (https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx/issues/163).

Ctrl+R is generally used for reverse search outside of a process, but I wonder if we can leverage it to trigger a reload inside of tsx.

@nirajsavaika Would you mind experimenting in your PR?

[lorefnon]

While I'm sure a better solution will be available at some point, for others who reach here looking for a solution to disable restart-on-enter conveniently, here is a simple alternative:

echo "" | npx tsx watch some-script.ts

[npdev453]

What about little restarting delay with signals counter? Like two or more 'enter' signals per 500ms shouln't cause restart.

[privatenumber]

Ideal solution

Manually reload watch via Ctrl+r

Problems

• Listening to Ctrl+r seems to require putting stdin in "raw mode" (process.stdin.setRawMode(true)), which disables all native shortcuts like Ctrl+c. Without raw mode, detecting any input requires the user "send" the input by pressing Enter. Perhaps this is why Nodemon's manual reload also requires Enter at the end (rs<Enter>).

• When also tackling https://github.com/esbuild-kit/tsx/issues/163, seems like listening to stdin at all (process.stdin.on()) could block or interfere with the child process correctly receiving stdin. And there's no way to passively listen to the stdin (even with a sibling process).

This may explain why Node.js hasn't implemented a manual way to reload watch (https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/50212). Perhaps it's also worth considering to remove the manual reload feature or watch feature completely as Node.js already has it and it's not really related to TypeScript.

Any help & input would be appreciated!

[np42]

I found another workaround to disable restart-on-enter, just by pressing Ctrl + d, which will close the stdin. It's an alternative to @lorefnon solution

[net]

It's way too easy to accidentally reload dev servers right now.