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Comment by andrewflnr

2 years ago

I was curious how the hot-reloading works on the browser side. It looks like it starts its own Firefox window, keeps a reference to it, and somehow directly sends an F5 keypress to it? I don't quite follow how that part works.

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andrewflnr

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adityaathalye  2 years ago

xdotool emulates user actions under the X Window System (e.g. typing, mouse around, click etc.).

I'm using it to send keypresses to the browser, as you rightly observe.

So if I want to just reload a page, the browser gets F5.

To GOTO some page, it gets a stream of keystrokes for the URL characters and then Enter.

It's really that simple-minded, and it works!

This case statement covers my usage: https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/bin/hotre...