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Comment by blopker | Hacker News Reader

Having a cross-platform file watcher built into a ubiquitous tool like git is pretty awesome. I could see build tools integrating with this and making more aspects of development faster without having to run a bunch of file watcher services. They all seem to have issues.

I have tried Watchman, but setting it up is a pain. There are so many ways to use it. I also welcome running less Facebook code on my systems.

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Except it's not cross-platform:

> It is currently available on macOS and Windows.

Today I learned that “cross-platform” means “all-platform.”

Considering there is only really three platforms I think it's a pretty fair assumption.. and we're talking about git here, you can assume cross platform includes Linux.

It looks cross-platform enough to me.

After all these years of Windows-only or MacOS-only software, you guys deserve this.

TBF, Git operations on repos with many small files are extraordinarily slow on Windows (probably not Git's fault, because all file operations involving many small files are slow on Windows, even copying stuff around on the desktop), so that feature is much more critical to have on Windows than Linux.

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I've stopped using anything language specific like Guard or nodemon. Instead I use the inotify commands on Linux and entr/ack on macOS so no matter what I'm doing, I can watch for changes in a directory.

I’ve got qualms with just about all of the big tech companies in one way or another.

My 2c is that one of the unambiguously positive externalities of the tech mega-corp trend is all the great OSS we get as a by-product of their operations.

I mean, I don’t exactly love how iPhones get made, but I’m pretty stoked that clang kicks ass now.

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