Understanding $watch

[Chandler-Zhu]

This is the $watch example in the official v3 doc

My question is does $watch always comes with x-init ? To me x-init only gets called once in the entire lifespan of a component, but $watch is watching for changes all the time , this confuses me a lot. If the data being watched changes, does the re-render go through an alpine:initializing phase as well ?

[KevinBatdorf]

When you use $watch you're telling Alpine to monitor a property long term (open in your example) and fire a callback (console.log()) when that property changes. x-init is the perfect place for that since you only want it to register the watcher one time.

Maybe a good way to think about it is you're "registering" a long-running watcher?