Watching for external edits stops in Linux

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1

Hi all, first of all, thanks for your work on Joplin!

I use gvim to edit documents externally on linux in v 1.0.158. Unfortunately about half of the time, Joplin stops watching the file and does not see the updates from the external editor file. I have not been able to reproduce consistently, but it seems that the line

2019-05-31 13:00:51: "ExternalEditWatcher: Event: unlink: /home/zach/.config/joplin-desktop/edit-2440e4599062486daf5144b529a23d87.md"

is logged when this happens.

This is a big inconvenience and has caused me to lose work several times.

Should I file an issue on github?

Thanks!

2

I had the issue, but it happened consistently after about 3 saves (I don’t remember exactly). To fix this I needed to start vim like this
gvim -c 'set backupcopy=yes'
And to get that into joplin (using gnome-terminal on linux)

image
image.png875Ă—93 10.7 KB

(Replace vim with gvim)

If this doesn’t fix your issue, you should probably open an issue on github.

2 Likes
3

Ah, just found this

I will try it

4

Putting it in .../ftplugin/markdown.vim or your vimrc as suggested by matthewmoppett is probably the easiest way to handle it.

5

Thanks @CalebJohn, that appears to have fixed it!

6

Maybe we should add this to the FAQ?

7

Yeah, it might be a good thing in the FAQ.

I think what would be more useful is to change the “Watching” button to say “Error” if an “unlink” event happens and possibly point to a place where they can find out how to fix it.

8

Another question is “should Joplin be able to tolerate these unlink events?” it would be nice if it just worked. Maybe chokidar has something that can handle it.

9

This seems like a relevant issue: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues/35, but it was closed long ago.

In any case, imo this code https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/commit/0a5ad1d6286fbb1632f56a43e9a8298229ea7ca5 needs to be changed so at least the button displays an accurate status, or maybe even can recover.

10

There are actually quite a few problems with fsevent and chokidar. And they are being worked on upstream.

I can't say anything to that, but maybe @laurent can.

11

I made an issue: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/1614

12

Same issue with xed on Linux Mint. I was using that since it came default. I get 1 save before it stops capturing changes. It seems that the -nb (no backup) argument for xed has been depreciated (found it on a manpage somewhere online).

Anyone using gedit? Is that working?

13

i’m using gedit on linux debian. 1 save before it stops capturing changes! i opened the discussion here: Bug saving notes in external editor