Treewatch was designed for use working on small code projects that are fairly quick to compile. By default, treewatch will watch the current directory for changes in files ending in .cpp, .c or .h. When matching files change on disk, treewatch runs /usr/bin/make to recompile the code.

The user can specify any number of directories to watch as well as any number of file types to watch for. The command and options that treewatch runs can also be freely chosen.