API to save a non-active document without formatting

[samestep]

Issue #38695 was resolved by adding a workbench.action.files.saveWithoutFormatting command which saves the document associated with the active text editor while enabling the skipSaveParticipants flag. Because this is a command, it's possible to invoke programmatically from an extension to save a document without formatting, as long as that document is currently associated with the active text editor. I currently use this in an extension I'm developing to save on every keystroke, which I plan to use for live programming purposes.

However, as far as I'm aware, there's no way to programmatically save any other document without formatting. This makes my "save constantly" extension much less relevant for my actual use case, in which a document is being edited without being associated with the active text editor, but I still want it to save on every change. Since I already have the TextDocument object, I should really be saving it via the save method, but that forces autoformat and thus is unusable if I have Files: Trim Trailing Whitespace enabled.

It'd be nice if the save method allowed me to pass the skipSaveParticipants option; see samestep/vscode-save-constantly#1 for an example of how I'd like to use that API if it existed.

[vs-code-engineering]

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Happy Coding!

[jrieken]

I don't think disabling save participants is the best way here. From our experience we know that very many tools to (heavy) operations on disk-save, like re-compile, test running, SCM update etc...

Maybe you can revisit the need to constantly save and just work off the in-memory state

[samestep]

@jrieken right, that's exactly my goal: to trigger my code to re-run immediately on every change, like in Bret Victor's famous demo. I definitely understand that this is usually undesirable and only makes sense in specific circumstances, which is why in that Save Constantly extension you can see that it's disabled by default, and only gets enabled when the user toggles it for an individual file.

Another way to think about this is that I already have the ability to programmatically save (with or without formatting) on every change when the document is associated with the active editor, so all I'm proposing is that the API surface be made more consistent by allowing me to do it for an arbitrary document.

Does that sound reasonable? In other words, I wouldn't be proposing this if it weren't already possible to do for the active editor.

[samestep]

I've now also tried samestep/vscode-save-constantly#2 which uses the workaround people previously used before #38695 was resolved, since I was hoping that might be acceptable. Unfortunately, that turned out to be much worse than I expected, so I now understand better why workbench.action.files.saveWithoutFormatting was so useful.

@jrieken to give more context, the reason I want to save the file is because I want the change to be picked up by Vite's file watcher, since I'm not aware of a way to tell Vite about the changes directly from VS Code without saving the file. When you say you don't think this is the best way here, what other approach do you have in mind?

[samestep]

Also, to clarify, while Vite is one use case I want to support with this, another reason I want to actually save the file is so that I can use this with any hot-reloading tool for any language, rather than having to write all my own VS-Code-specific ones. For instance, I also want to use something like jurigged for Python.