I'm trying to set up a custom toolchain where the browser (Firefox or, preferrably, Chrome) is often/frequently/constantly forced to refresh from the commandline.
(The idea is to instantly see the visual changes in the html/webapp I'm editing in an adjacent Emacs frame - without having to constantly tab to the browser to do a manual refresh.)
The closest I've come so far is to run google-chrome FILE_PATH. However this opens a new tab every time.
Are there other approaches?
Something to play with
It uses xdotool, which lets you script windows/desktop actions. If you supply the name of the browser as an argument, it'll find and reload the current page. You can set a default browser, so you don't need to supply one each time, and you can change whether you send a CTRL-R to reload, or SHIFT-CTRL-R to reload without cache.
It should flip to your browser, reload the page, then flip back to whatever window you called this from. I use this often by putting browser in background, with editor window set to 'ON-TOP' so it's always visible, hot-key this script, or call it from your editor, and it'll return your focus when it's done.
I'm a vim user, and I could see making an autocommand to automatically trigger this script whenever a given file was written, so the browser would refresh when appropriate, I know you can do the same.
#!/bin/bash
#
# L Nix <[email protected]>
# reload browser window
#
# whether to use SHIFT+CTRL+R to force reload without cache
RELOAD_KEYS="CTRL+R"
#RELOAD_KEYS="SHIFT+CTRL+R"
#
# set to whatever's given as argument
BROWSER=$1
#
# if was empty, default set to name of browser, firefox/chrome/opera/etc..
if [ -z "${BROWSER}" ]; then
BROWSER=firefox
fi
#
# get which window is active right now
MYWINDOW=$(xdotool getactivewindow)
#
# bring up the browser
xdotool search --name ${BROWSER} windowactivate --sync
# send the page-reload keys (C-R) or (S-C-R)
xdotool search --name ${BROWSER} key --clearmodifiers ${RELOAD_KEYS}
#
# sometimes the focus doesn't work, so follow up with activate
xdotool windowfocus --sync ${MYWINDOW}
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${MYWINDOW}
#
--name parameter matches against the string that is displayed in the window titlebar so it might not always contain the name of the browser as in this here example.
Warning: XTEST extension unavailable on '(null)'. Some functionality may be disabled; See 'man xdotool' for more info.
@lornix's answer didn't quite work for me (I'm not sure why, possibly my window manager doesn't let xdotool switch windows). I wrote a modified version which should be more robust, it:
(Also it uses F5 instead of Ctrl-R, but that's just because I have Ctrl-R bound to something else.)
#!/bin/bash
set -o errexit
set -o nounset
keystroke="CTRL+F5"
# set to whatever's given as argument, defaults to firefox
BROWSER="${1:-firefox}"
# find all visible browser windows
browser_windows="$(xdotool search --sync --all --onlyvisible --name ${BROWSER})"
# Send keystroke
for bw in $browser_windows; do
xdotool key --window "$bw" "$keystroke"
done
If you are using Firefox, Auto Reload is an extension where it reloads whenever file changes. You can add files, directories or localhost and edit regex based filters so that you will achieve what you want. I don't know any complementary to this in Chrome. link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reload/
None of these quite worked for me, so here's my own version:
SHOULD_SWITCH_BACK=$1 # y/Y means it will switch back to current window
CURRENT_WINDOW=$(xdotool getactivewindow)
KEY="CTRL+F5"
BROWSER="Firefox"
xdotool search --desktop 0 ${BROWSER} windowactivate
xdotool key ${KEY}
if [[ $SHOULD_SWITCH_BACK == 'y' || $SHOULD_SWITCH_BACK == 'Y' ]]; then
xdotool windowfocus --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
fi
I don't know what --desktop 0 means. I'm not familiar with xdotool, but I saw the --desktop line on https://askubuntu.com/questions/21262/shell-command-to-bring-a-program-window-in-front-of-another and it worked for me.
I originally posted this on my website at https://www.taeluf.com/blog/bash/reload-browser-tab/
For OS X you can use this bit of applescript:
activate application "Firefox"
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "r" using command down
E.g. by executing it from the terminal:
osascript \
-e 'activate application "Firefox"' \
-e 'tell application "System Events" to keystroke "r" using command down'
The add-on Live Reload by Blaise Kal polls source files for changes in the background and reloads the whole browser tab when changes have been detected. It does not need to be triggered externally and is available for Chrome and Firefox. With this approach it is compatible with many web frameworks and requires few configuration. It may spam your server log, though.
for chrome/chromium
achieved by abusing the CDT protocol
extensible with the powerful jq(1)
not painful to use in Makefile (a snippet included)
