Async and refresh questions

[ElPiloto]

Hello again, I've finally gotten some time to work on another custom source and I had a few questions.

1. Is there an example of the right way to refresh my source? I normally run :Neotree my_source and I've been refreshing by re-running that command. But I'm wondering if there's a more official way? I'm actually not sure how :Neotree my_source makes its way to my source's .navigate function or else I'd try to mimic that path to do a refresh more directly.

2. I'm now populating my custom source with some outputs from mercurial which can take a bit of time to load. Are there any examples of populating Neotree asynchronously so that neovim stays responsive during that long load?

As always, thanks for your time and for making this awesome plugin.

[cseickel]

1. Is there an example of the right way to refresh my source?

Refreshing usually happens from either someone pressing R within the Neo-tree window to refresh manually, or automatically in response to events. You can look at the setup function in the init.lua file of any other source to see examples of subscribing to events. You can also use file watchers to refresh when a file is changed. That is more complicated and you have to make sure you unwatch folders when you are done. Only the filesystem source does this.

I'm actually not sure how :Neotree my_source makes its way to my source's .navigate function or else I'd try to mimic that path to do a refresh more directly.

The commands are defined in the plugin directory, and they call neo-tree.command.execute()

neo-tree.nvim/lua/neo-tree/command/init.lua

Lines 14 to 40 in 3c70bb4

	---Executes a Neo-tree action from outside of a Neo-tree window,
	---such as show, hide, navigate, etc.
	---@param args table The action to execute. The table can have the following keys:
	--- action = string The action to execute, can be one of:
	--- "close",
	--- "focus", <-- default value
	--- "show",
	--- source = string The source to use for this action. This will default
	--- to the default_source specified in the user's config.
	--- Can be one of:
	--- "filesystem",
	--- "buffers",
	--- "git_status",
	-- "migrations"
	--- position = string The position this action will affect. This will default
	--- to the the last used position or the position specified
	--- in the user's config for the given source. Can be one of:
	--- "left",
	--- "right",
	--- "float",
	--- "current"
	--- toggle = boolean Whether to toggle the visibility of the Neo-tree window.
	--- reveal = boolean Whether to reveal the current file in the Neo-tree window.
	--- reveal_file = string The specific file to reveal.
	--- dir = string The root directory to set.
	--- git_base = string The git base used for diff
	M.execute = function(args)

2. I'm now populating my custom source with some outputs from mercurial which can take a bit of time to load. Are there any examples of populating Neotree asynchronously so that neovim stays responsive during that long load?

The filesystem source will run asynchronously in some situations, and git status updates run asynchronously by default. Here is the code for that:

neo-tree.nvim/lua/neo-tree/git/status.lua

Line 203 in 3c70bb4

M.status_async = function(path, base, opts)

It uses Plenary's Job for the async part. The git code is extra complicated because there are so many edge cases and we support showing status diffed to any arbitrary branch.