[Feature Request] JetBrains' File Watcher integration for "AI!" comments

[wizzard0]

Issue

"AI!" comments work great with VS Code, but with JetBrains products' (Webstorm, Goland, IntelliJ IDEA etc) they cause a blocking modal "File Cache Conflict" dialog when the file in the active editor tab gets modified (i.e. always)

Looking at the JetBrains' bug tracker, this behavior is by design and they are unlikely to implement the "always reload" option.

They prefer to trigger the external on-save tools directly from the IDE.
When registered this way, tsc or gofmt run upon file save and their changes get reloaded just fine.

I tried to register Aider this way, but a) it doesn't seem to pick up AI! comments when started without --watch-files, and b) the tool stdout is not available until the tool exits

Solution

What we can do is to add an additional script that simply blocks while the main Aider watcher process is talking to the LLM/running tests/etc, then exits when the main process is ready to accept new commands.

To avoid fragile stuff like sockets etc, the simplest way to integrate them would be to create a file like .aider-processing with PID of the main Aider process in the repository root, and delete it when Aider is ready to accept further input.

Version and model info

Aider v0.67.0, --watch-files

[paul-gauthier]

Thanks for trying aider and filing this issue.

I'd like to make aider work better with JetBrains, but they've made a pretty unusual and opinionated choice here if you describing it correctly.

[wizzard0]

Well, i got impatient and implemented that in #2612 :)

No idea how that fits with Aider style/architecture, so I'm open to suggestions if there are better places to create/clear the canary file.

Otherwise, works smoothly for me so far.