Evince is no longer auto-reloading documents. How can I troubleshoot this?

Solution 1:

Luis' suggestion worked. I used the following command:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p

as suggested by the question he linked to, which was addressing Dropbox syncing.

Solution 2:

A completely different reason why this problem might happen: Evince (as well as Atril) won't auto-reload a document that has been opened via a symlink.

$ ln -s example.pdf link-to-example.pdf
$ evince link-to-example.pdf

At this point, changing example.pdf will not trigger a reload in Evince, as it would if you had directly opened the file as evince example.pdf. (The idea seems to be that the “file I've opened”, i.e. the symlink, has not in fact changed.)

Short of manually looking up the link location, one way to circumvent this issue is to have Bash do it on the command line:

$ evince $(readlink link-to-example.pdf)

or more generally

$ evince $(realpath link-to-example.pdf)