Geany: automatically 'Reload the current file from disk' upon external modificati­on

[landroni]

Currently Geany will pop-up a dialogue:
"The file 'gWidgets2-filter.R' on the disk is more recent than
the current buffer.

Do you want to reload it?"

when the same file has been modified externally. When working on a file using two different editors at the same time (and saving frequently; e.g. see http://wiki.geany.org/howtos/using_geany_with_r#combining_geany_with_rstudio ), the workflow would be nicer if the file were automatically reloaded from disk upon external modification.

Please add a hidden option that would disable the confirmation dialogue when 'Reloading the current file from disk' upon external modification.

[codebrainz]

If I recall correctly, in SublimeText it will automatically reload unless there are unsaved changes, in which case it pops up a dialog. It seems like a reasonable thing to do, even enough for a first class preference maybe (as opposed to hidden/various pref).

[landroni]

Yes, another example of IDE that behaves like this is RStudio: it will automatically reload unless there are unsaved changes. When there _are_ unsaved changes, it does pop-up the following dialogue:
"The file gWidgets2-filter.R has changed on disk. Do you want to reload the file from disk and discard your unsaved changes?"

[kugel-]

This feature should be trivial to add

[BenWiederhake]

Is there any activity on this? I was about to create a new issue for this when I saw this 1 year old thread.
Use case: git rebase touches many files that I would like to be reloaded automatically.)

[pilkch]

Git checkout also causes this for many files, at least for the branches I work with.

[elextr]

@BenWiederhake it doesn't appear that anyone has needed or wanted it enough to make a pull request.

[BenWiederhake]

Hmm, that doesn't look as trivial as I hoped for. Here are some observations:

• The best position would probably be right below the "Disk check timeout" option, probably named "Automatic reload".
• That GUI element is defined in data/geany.glade:4596, so for a new property, this file would need to be touched. HACKING seems to recommend Glade 3.8.5, so I'll go with that.
• The correlation to internal keys seems to be done in src/keyfile.c:222, so for a new property, this file would need to be touched.
• When a file is deemed reload-necessary, monitor_reload_file in src/document.c:3606 seems to be called to trigger the notification. So for the new property, this function would need to be touched.
• Apparently, this uses the "new 'simple' prefs", as src/prefs.c puts it, so this file would need no changes.

Does this so far sound like a good idea? I'm new to the project, so I'd like to hear feedback whether a PR changing these places would have hopes of being accepted.

[codebrainz]

The original Issue is somewhat invalidated now that document messages are shown in a non-modal infobar. If the focus is setup correctly, it should be a matter of tabbing to a document and pressing Enter (or the mnemonic, or Ctrl + R).

Perhaps it would be more appropriate to add a "Reload All" command instead?

[elextr]

There was an attempt at "reload all" in #54.

[shiftee]

My PR https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/1246 for this issue is looking for suitably qualified testers.
Details here in paragraph 2 & 3: https://github.com/geany/geany/pull/1246#issuecomment-290047712

[attila-v]

HI shiftee,
I made a different version of 'reload all' feature than you. You can show it and try it from the #1471 pull request.
My plan was an icon on toolbar and a command in the file menu with shortcut key. If many files has opened and must reload them, just click on the icon or press Alt+r, and voila!
cheers

[elextr]

There is now an option to autoreload files which change on disk if they have no changes in the buffer, #1246 should close this unless I misunderstand.