Watch-fn VS chokidar

Compare Watch-fn vs chokidar and see what are their differences.

Watch-fn

By selfrefactor

chokidar

Minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library (by paulmillr)
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Watch-fn chokidar
- 27
9 10,947
- -
0.0 8.5
- 10 days ago
JavaScript JavaScript
ISC License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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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.

Watch-fn

Posts with mentions or reviews of Watch-fn. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects.

We haven't tracked posts mentioning Watch-fn yet.
Tracking mentions began in Dec 2020.

chokidar

Posts with mentions or reviews of chokidar. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-08-08.
  • Migrating from chokidar 3.x to 4.x
    1 project | dev.to | 17 Sep 2024
    A big win recently in the e18e space is that chokidar published a new 4.x version!
  • Chokidar 4.0
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2024
  • Boosting Rocket.Chat App Development with Hot Reload
    4 projects | dev.to | 8 Aug 2024
    I used the Chokidar library to watch for changes in the project directory. Chokidar detects file changes and triggers deployment commands automatically.
  • How to build a Web IDE like codesandbox?
    4 projects | dev.to | 16 Jun 2024
    We have a file explorer and a terminal, since files or directories could also be modified via terminal we need a way to communicate those changes to frontend. For this I made use of Chokidar, this package lets us setup file system watcher (nodemon also makes use of chokidar) and through following callbacks we can communicate file system changes.
  • The best testing setup for frontends, with Playwright and NextJS
    5 projects | dev.to | 18 Apr 2024
    For this, we'll use chokidar - more specifically the chokidar-cli package. chokidar is probably the most useful file watching library for the nodejs ecosystem and it will serve us well.
  • Why Does 'Is-Number' Package Have 59M Weekly Downloads?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Mar 2024
    tailwindcss -> chokidar -> braces -> fill-range -> to-regex-range -> is-number

    is-number was first published 9 years ago, when these kind of micro-packages were in vogue. braces was added as a dependency to chokidar over 6 years ago [1]. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think the average JS dev today is going out and pulling in these deps.

    [1] https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/commit/cbdf25563cfff7f...

  • How nodemon works?
    1 project | /r/node | 19 Aug 2023
    The watching magic is really in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar library
  • Dart 3.1 and a retrospective on functional style programming in Dart
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
    > It’s typical to listen to this stream of events and use chained if-else statements to determine an action based on the type of the events that occur.

    You'd think something like directory watching would have a clear set of events that would make nice objects with consistent meanings, but in my experience file watching gets crazy complicated, and can have all sorts of edge cases.

    Just take a looked here for all the various edge cases that crop up: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues

    Then you have linux, windows, macos, and maybe you want to abstract over some underlying implementation like chokidar vs fb/watchman vs webpack/watchpack. Every new OS release could also cause things to change.

    So usually its going to be a bunch of if-else statements hacked together to get around edge cases, and have to be revisited later on.

    Any attempt to abstract this into objects, just obfuscates things. And OO forces you to name things, when in fact they might be un-nameable. `FileSystemModifyEventExceptWhenXAndYAndSometimesZ`.

    The behavior might rely on a series of events together, so the object hierarchy must be re-worked.

    OO has this rosy idea that we just have to come up with the perfect hierarchy, but things change in unexpected ways, and everything must have a descriptive noun.

  • Is there anyway to auto reload the browser page when using express?
    2 projects | /r/learnjavascript | 13 Jun 2023
    Next, you can use a library like chokidar to listen for changes in your source directory. Create a ws server, and whenever a file changes, send a message.
  • How does nodemon works under the hood?
    4 projects | /r/node | 14 Mar 2023
    As another has mentioned, nodemon uses chokidar under the hood for the actual file watching part.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Watch-fn and chokidar you can also consider the following projects:

globby - User-friendly glob matching

Filehound - Flexible and fluent interface for searching the file system

fs-extra - Node.js: extra methods for the fs object like copy(), remove(), mkdirs()

Nodemon.io - Monitor for any changes in your node.js application and automatically restart the server - perfect for development

make-dir - Make a directory and its parents if needed - Think `mkdir -p`

mkdirp - Recursively mkdir, like `mkdir -p`, but in node.js

rimraf - A `rm -rf` util for nodejs

graceful-fs - fs with incremental backoff on EMFILE

filenamify - Convert a string to a valid safe filename

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