entr vs watchman

entr

A utility for running arbitrary commands when files change. Uses kqueue(2) or inotify(7) to avoid polling. entr responds to file system events by executing command line arguments or by writing to a FIFO. entr was written to provide to make rapid feedback and automated testing natural and completely ordinary. (by clibs)

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watchman

Execute a command when something changes (by crodjer)

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entr		watchman
	Project
5	Mentions	4
593	Stars	458
0.5%	Growth	-
5.6	Activity	3.6
7 months ago	Latest Commit	6 months ago
C	Language	Shell
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later	License	GNU General Public License v3.0 only

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

entr

Posts with mentions or reviews of entr. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-05.

how to run command in vim terminal automatically?
1 project | /r/vim | 8 Feb 2023

You could look into entr.
Watchman: Execute a command when something changes
13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Oct 2022

Not sure what generated interest in this.
This was a project I did for my personal use case. But I haven't been using it since years. I'd recommend [entr](https://github.com/clibs/entr) for the use case watchman was to serve.
How to automatically run a command when directory updates?
3 projects | /r/commandline | 13 Sep 2022

entr is what I usually reach for when I want to monitor a directory or a list of files and then perform some action on them when changes occur
Show HN: Pystitcher – A Declarative Alternative to Pdftk
4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 2021

I've tested it against a 800 page compilation and didn't face any issues : https://github.com/captn3m0/pdp-book
It's obviously not fast enough for live-recompilations with very large projects, but for smaller projects I've run it against entr[0], and it was pretty good.
[0]: https://github.com/clibs/entr

watchman

Posts with mentions or reviews of watchman. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-05.

Watchman: Execute a command when something changes
1 project | /r/patient_hackernews | 5 Oct 2022

1 project | /r/hackernews | 5 Oct 2022

1 project | /r/hypeurls | 5 Oct 2022

13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Oct 2022

What are some alternatives?

When comparing entr and watchman you can also consider the following projects:

watchman - Watches files and records, or triggers actions, when they change.

WatchMod - Watch for modifications to trigger actions. Useful for compiling Go templates, Sass, Typescript, and more.

watchexec - Executes commands in response to file modifications

fwe - File Watch Execute

fswatch - A cross-platform file change monitor with multiple backends: Apple OS X File System Events, *BSD kqueue, Solaris/Illumos File Events Notification, Linux inotify, Microsoft Windows and a stat()-based backend.

watchdog - Python library and shell utilities to monitor filesystem events.

watcher - Filesystem watcher. Works anywhere. Simple, efficient and friendly.

reflex - Run a command when files change

pikepdf - A Python library for reading and writing PDF, powered by QPDF

dotfiles - :octocat: Tim does dotfiles