That’s a good writeup, thankyou! I’ve not played with nodemon before, but will be keeping it in mind, and watch-fs looks even more useful.
I think we’ve been talking a little cross purposes here. I was advocating for node TW to see and pickup changes to the filesystem (and refuting claim that would necessarily be expensive) as useful, and my thinking at the time was primarily my own usecase so far, which is one-off imports.
In general, I think I’d categorise “automation” as being reoccurring, but “integration” could be either reccuring, or once-off/adhoc.
I doubt I’ll ever be importing from tomboy notes ever again. Or from tw classic files. Or from cctiddly, etc. More relevant for me (and only mentioned above as an aside), it’s important to me that I not only have the data in TW, but in the git repo that is storing the history of the data. That is, I’m importing the history into git. The final version is also visible to TW. But afaik, TW doesn’t manage local git repos, certainly not to the esoteric git usage I do. So even if I do end up running similar imports of similar data, I would do the same. If the history-to-git wasn’t a consideration, even then I still think “convert to (relatively simple) .tid format and write to a file” is simpler than “convert to valid json format, and send via API call”.
However circling back to automation of regular tasks, I’ve been thinking of some of the things I’ve got automated to other adhoc solutions and what could be put into TW instead, and I think the watch-fs will suit that well (though I also need to delve into the plotting thread: Does Tiddlywiki have a preferred Plotting/Graphics js tool? - my current adhoc setup is writing data in csv format and visualising it using dygraph, but updating the CSV within TW, having TW pickup the new data, and then visualise that within TW I think will be a much nicer workflow)
Those cases where it works well look ideal! Thank you for testing. Natve watch-fs for live edits to existing files, and nodeTW API for adding / deleting, will make for the ideal mix that never requires node to be restarted?