Here is the start on #3 fix @dmnd. feedback is welcome on this WIP

Thanks I'll make these fixes...def want to be working the React / coffeescript idioms. Knew this first version didn't quite fit the way it should

Hey @dmnd i have refactored to use forceUpdate(). This causes the BlameListView render to be called and the annotations to be properly prepared to handle folds, but it does not cause the BlameLinesComponent to be redrawn. Any ideas on why? I haven't been able to figure it out.

It's probably because of shouldComponentUpdate. Two options:

1. Add a check to see if annotations have changed:

   shouldComponentUpdate: ({loading, dirty, annotations}) ->
     if @props.loading and not loading and not @props.dirty
       # finished the initial load
       return true
   
     if @props.dirty and not dirty
       # user hit save, so re-render according to edits
       return true
   
     unless _.isEqual @props.annotations, annotations
       # the annotations array changes when code is folded
       # TODO: use an immutable array so we can do an identity check here
       return true
   
     # in all other cases, don't bother re-rendering
     # TODO: is this still a useful optimization?
     return false

   This check is pretty expensive now since we have to do a deep comparison. In theory we could just do an identity comparison as long as we're careful to never mutate that array in place. That might be ok? If we change to using an immutable array, that can be enforced.

2. Just delete shouldComponentUpdate. I originally added this when we had no reason to re-render the view. In theory it helps performance, but I never actually verified that. When we had no reason to re-render it made sense to have it just to make things easy to reason about. But that time seems to have passed now 😄 You can probably just delete this function and let the view always re-render when its parent does.

closing this. looking into bigger changes to how the front end rendering works.