Hacker News Reader

I think every platform supports FS notifications at least right? The app could listen for changes to the file and reload/discard when it goes out of sync. In fact Notepad++ already does this.

On Windows in particular you also have a ton of other facilities that could help with this (opportunistic locks, transactions, etc.) but notification is usually good enough.

View on HN

My main editor is vim. It notifies the user when a file you have open in a buffer gets modified on disk by another process. It explicitly gives you the option to load the file from disk at this time. I would not use a text editor which silently reloads a file because this could result in a loss of work.

Yeah Notepad++ asks you too. I don't know of any editors that silently discard changes by default.

While many editors will come and go, vi in some form will always remain. Once you "get" it, using anything else starts to become alien.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com