Monitor subdirectories for changed files

[m-guggenmos]

Description

Quarto newbie question. I created a new website project and was pleased to see that the html preview is automatically refreshed when I change qmd files in the top-level root directory of my project (using quarto preview). However, subdirectories do not seem to be monitored for changes in qmd files. Can I configure this somehow?

I'm using VS Code with the Quarto extension.

[mcanouil]

Quarto only watches needed resources, it's not really about directories.
Without knowing your exact setup, it's impossible to fully answer.

[m-guggenmos]

Ok, I found a way for now. The quarto extension has a hard-coded command line argument --no-watch-inputs for quarto preview. I commented the line cmd.push("--no-watch-inputs") in ~/.vscode/extensions/quarto.quarto-1.90.0/out/main.js and it now seems to listen to file changes also in subdirectories.

[cderv]

@jjallaire FYI

Should we try to make this an option in Quarto VSCODE extension if this has some use case ?

Or maybe we did deactivate it for some specific reason ?

https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto/blob/a92906bbd004e3d8abc39b5f59346ca2a091d1e8/apps/vscode/src/providers/preview/preview.ts#L461

[mcanouil]

Probably for the same reason as the "render on save" feature is deactivated by default, but I agree that an option is advisable.

[m-guggenmos]

What confused me initially is the fact that there seems to be a quarto.yml option to control this behavior:

https://quarto.org/docs/reference/projects/websites.html#preview

According to the docs watch-inputs is true by default.

[mcanouil]

Yes but it's _quarto.yml.
(I don't know if the VSCode extension respects that but it should)

[jjallaire]

The reason we force --no-watch-inputs is that the VS Code extension does explicit rendering of documents (either vis Render or Render on Save). If the preview server were also auto-rendering on changes then you would get a double render (which for some documents could be very expensive). That said, we may have subsequently put in protection against double renders so it might appear to work w/o troubles when you comment that out.

If you use the render-on-save option in VS Code then you more or less get the behavior you want. The only thing it doesn't do is automatically detect changes to documents that are not currently active in the preview window. You could get this to work by just running quarto preview from a terminal then just editing/saving as normal in VS Code.

[m-guggenmos]

Thanks a lot @jjallaire , that is very helpful!