I am working on HTML/CSS/JavaScript from within emacs. My workflow is currently

Make a change -> Alt-Tab to browser -> F5 (refresh) -> Alt Tab to emacs

Do any extensions exist that would auto-refresh the browser on a change? Or, possibly a better idea, when I hit a key bination from within emacs?

I am working on HTML/CSS/JavaScript from within emacs. My workflow is currently

Make a change -> Alt-Tab to browser -> F5 (refresh) -> Alt Tab to emacs

Do any extensions exist that would auto-refresh the browser on a change? Or, possibly a better idea, when I hit a key bination from within emacs?

• javascript
• html
• css
• emacs

• Possible Dupe: stackoverflow./questions/3309599/… – Eric Leschinski Commented Aug 19, 2013 at 3:36

3 Answers 3

I've tried impatient-mode and it worked nicely for what I needed. It also can be extended to do things like, for example, display the contents of a buffer you are editing in an iframe alongside other buffers etc.

Option 1, refresh the browser on interval:

With the addition of a single meta tag into your html document, you can instruct the browser to automatically refresh at a designated interval number of seconds:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3" />

Option 2, firefox plugin to refresh on document change:

A Firefox Add-on, called XRefresh, will monitor your project folder, and, every time it detects a change to the source files, it’ll reload Firefox.

Option 3, refresh the page from Emacs, vim or shell script:

There is a firefox plugin called IMACROS that let you define a script that will remote control firefox from a file on disk. You can create a remote control script, and then program Emacs, vim or shell script to tell firefox to run the remote control script when you are ready, thus refreshing the page. You would need to create a keyboard hook to kickoff the script on save.

I use Yeoman, which help you scaffold web apps, which uses Grunt and the mand

$grunt server 

It is a simple setup that enables "livereload". I then set up my localhost or rather IP:9000 which enables live reload of any device in my local network upon file save of all watched files (scss, js, coffee, html) etc. So you can see the site change upon save not only on your desktop, but your tablet, mobile devices, cross browser, smart tv etc..

It also runs pass, unit tests, uglifies & concatenates, does the dishes, walks the dog you name it. Then "$ grunt build" creates plete distributions to deploy.

It's worth a look, it's a bit of a setup, I had a few hurdles, but it's amazing what you get back.