Nice!

I probably will have a look at it next week.
I might use your code as a starting point, keeping in mind a possible
future auto-refresh (on disk update) functionality.

No worries, about the crappy code.
I am a decent Java developer, but a horrible C coder myself too. :)

On Thu, 27 Jun 2019 at 10:30, metastork <email address hidden> wrote:

> Hi, in case you want to consider merging this, I've made a pull request
> for my local install adding a --refresh command line argument
> functionality, which seems to work fine (but please note I have never
> coded in C properly, so please check that it looks fine if considering
> it):
>
> https://code.launchpad.net/~metastork/xpad/xpad
>
> (sorry about the errant white-space diffs in the branch - I'm new to bzr
> and wasn't able to get it to ignore white spaces that sublime text seems
> to have inserted for no obvious reason)
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to Xpad.
> Matching subscriptions: Arthur Borsboom
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1834336
>
> Title:
>   Reload if content file changed on disk (feature request)
>
> Status in Xpad:
>   New
>
> Bug description:
>   Hi all, wonderful work on xpad, and the scrollbars fix in version 5.4
>   is working very well! I thought I'd float a small request for a
>   feature, which others might perhaps find useful if using xpad as a
>   todolist.
>
>   Currently, I think, if directly modifying a ~/.config/xpad/content-
>   ABCDEF file in a text editor, an existing xpad instance that is open
>   does not reflect those changes (which is expected behaviour).
>
>   But it may be useful if xpad periodically checks when it's running
>   whether a content-ABCDEF file has been modified more recently than the
>   last time xpad has written the file and, if it has been, to reload the
>   file from disk.
>
>   ==Why?==
>
>   This would allow using command line tools (like TODO.txt, awk, etc) or
>   text editors to do more advanced searches and manipulation of the
>   content file (i.e., to have a script automatically and periodically
>   delete any items that have been marked DONE or formatted with
>   'strikethrough' (or even archive those into another xpad note), or to
>   sort the file by priority of tasks, etc).
>
>   It is possible to currently emulate this behaviour by using "xpad
>   --quit" and restarting xpad but that's perhaps less elegant for those
>   who keep it running in the background, and it could be nice if it was
>   native functionality.
>
>   Edit: Another temporary but much easier solution to implement, could
>   be a command line option like --refresh. This could manually reload
>   all open files from disk and could be triggered by users' scripts
>   manipulating the content files.
>
>   ==Potential risks==
>
>   While a fairly simple operation, this could negatively impact
>   performance a little (potentially the check could be limited to only
>   run if an xpad window is currently in focus / active?).
>
>   It could also lead to issues in xpad remembering the previous cursor
>   position within a note, if complex manipulations have been made, which
>   may be more tricky to solve (but it could perhaps be behaviour that a
>   user would accept if they intentionally manually modify the file...)
>
>   Finally, I'm not sure how robust the content- file format is and if it
>   would be possible for users to corrupt the file if they accidentally
>   break some formatting codes or insert strange characters into the
>   file.
>
>   Would be happy to hear the community's thoughts on if this would be a
>   useful feature.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/xpad/+bug/1834336/+subscriptions
>


-- 
Arthur Borsboom
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Email: <email address hidden>
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