Feature request: Watching without hot-code reloading

[anka-213]

Sometimes things can break when the hot-code reloading is used or it is difficult to setup (e.g. when web socket port-forwarding isn't available). It would be nice to still be able to use elm-watch's watch-feature without injecting the hot-code reloading code.

Would that be difficult to implement?

[lydell]

Hi! In my notes for elm-watch, which I wrote before even starting coding, I had the idea that there should be three commands:

• elm-watch make
• elm-watch watch
• elm-watch hot

But when I started coding I realized that watch had a surprising amount of differences to hot, and I knew that it wouldn’t be something that I would use in the end, so I scrapped it.

I personally don’t feel like adding new features to elm-watch (other than maybe un-beta:ing the beta some time). These days I’m more interested in replacing elm-watch with a similar feature in the Lamdera compiler (which is open source and can be used for vanilla Elm apps as well – and the first step towards that is lamdera/compiler#65).

[anka-213]

Yeah, that's fair! I didn't know if it was a hugely different thing or relatively simple to add. Thanks for the quick response!