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Watchman Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to watchman
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jj
Discontinued A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful [Moved to: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj] (by martinvonz)
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spec
Development Containers: Use a container as a full-featured development environment. (by devcontainers)
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fswatch
A cross-platform file change monitor with multiple backends: Apple macOS File System Events, *BSD kqueue, Solaris/Illumos File Events Notification, Linux inotify and fanotify, Microsoft Windows and a stat()-based backend.
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EdenSCM
Discontinued A Scalable, User-Friendly Source Control System. [Moved to: https://github.com/facebook/sapling]
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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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NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better watchman alternative or higher similarity.
watchman discussion
watchman reviews and mentions
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 2026-04-23.
- Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite
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First Time Using GitHub CoPilot to Create a ReactNative LoginPage app. What Could Go Wrong?
Install Watchman, also created by Facebook, which watches files, recording when they change.
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A Personal Guide to Setting Up React Native on Mac: My Journey
Official Docs: Node.js & Watchman
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Jujutsu for Everyone
You might be interested in how this problem was solved by our team at Meta, in EdenFS (https://github.com/facebook/sapling/blob/main/eden/fs/docs/O...) and Watchman: https://github.com/facebook/watchman.
What you're describing is reasonably similar to EdenFS, except EdenFS runs in userspace.
Watchman layers a consistent view of file metadata on top of inotify (etc), as well as providing stateless queries on top of EdenFS. It acts as a unified interface over regular filesystems as well as Eden.
Back in the day, Watchman sped up status queries by over 5x for a repo with hundreds of thousands of files: https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-infra/scaling-mer... I worked directly on this and co-wrote this blog post.
In truth, getting these working was a very difficult systems problem with a ton of event ordering and cache invalidation concerns. For smaller repos, it is much simpler to do linear scans. Since it is really fast on modern hardware anyway, it is also the right thing to do, following the maxim of doing the simplest thing that works.
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Steve Klabnik's Tutorial on Jujutsu (Git replacement)
It's a bit of a magic trick. A "snapshot" is taken any time a command is run, so for all intents and purposes it's "automatic" from the user interface e.g. even checking repo status or otherwise small operations will cause a snapshot.
But you can integrate with https://github.com/facebook/watchman/ in order to have a truly daemon-ified option where any filesystem write will cause a snapshot to be taken.
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From React to React Native – A Beginner-Friendly Guide🚀
Install Node.js and Watchman: Ensure that you have the latest version of Node.js installed, as well as Watchman, which is a tool used for watching file changes.
- Stripe's Monorepo Developer Environment
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Ask HN: Best file watcher for Node.js/Bun
I liked the idea of Facebook's watchman. Cross-platform and it would only add a watcher on each dir once, regardless of how many apps needed watcher functionality.
But it's currently uninstallable for weeks on macOS without some pain (https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues/1199).
There is `rs-notify` and `watchexec` that builds on that but seems a bit unstable.
It's 2024, and we still don't have a good way to reliably watch a large number of files :(
The bit rot is pretty crazy. Watchman's decline was a bit shocking.
- Watchman – A File Watching Service
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Dev Container for React Native with Expo
postCreateCommand This section permit to execute a command after the build of the container. I've used this command to execute a script to install Expo and other dependencies like watchman
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 11 Jun 2026
Stats
Basic watchman repo stats
39
13,597
9.5
5 days ago
facebook/watchman is an open source project licensed under MIT License which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of watchman is C++.
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