luv VS fwatch.nvim

Hi, I had this issue and I solved it by building https://github.com/luvit/luv myself.

To answer the OP's question, you could tackle luv and libuv ecosystem, as a way to connect Lua to real-world systems (files, sockets, servers...). That's one way to put Lua skills to use, there are other great answers in the thread. Another recommendation is to go through Programming in Lua book, especially the later chapters where you learn how Lua talks to the host application.

Alternatively you can get into the weeds and play around with the in built vim.loop (which is really just luv, specifically spawn to run commands on the OS and handle stdout processing via stream.

Unfortunately I doubt they are able to use netrw, it interfaces with user facing buffers too much. Telescope uses plenary which uses lua's luv implementation (bound to vim.loop). Fzf-lua uses an external binary called fzf

Lua is still actively used so there is a great number of libraries that came out in last 9 years. A decent example is the luv library that is packed with great functionality. On the whole I'm quite satisfied with the ecosystem, but it all depends on the domain.

You should be able to find plenty of examples of asynchronous code at https://github.com/luvit/luv and translate it.

The first thing I would recommend is read the official documentation. Both libuv and luvit (or more specifically luv)

I spent some time converting the luv documentation to make it available in :help and make the vim.loop module more discoverable. Thought plugin authors might be interested.

I'm assuming this one.

You can also setup file watchers with uv/vim.loop, there's a basic example implementation here, which could be used to recompile & apply whenever pywal.json was updated.

I don’t use NeoVim but this look like it could work.

(If you want buid-on-save, you could use fwatch.nvim, your own libuv wrapper, entr, or any other watcher. Automatic building is out-of-scope for Shipwright.)

The author of fwatch.nvim showed me how easy it was to use libuv to watch files and directories, and after a few days I've been able to implement the feature. It still needs more work and real-world testing, but the fact that a novice like me was able to get this working inside Neovim (and in a couple of hundred lines of code) is astounding.

It's called fwatch.