Comment by adityaathalye

Lovely to hear from you, Andy! Thank you for sharing. It's good to know this work is in fine company :)

> although it sounds like it has some drawbacks?

Oh yes. The Xdotool Reload Method emulates keystrokes, so it has... drawbacks... as you put it mildly :)

For my use-case, it literally does F5, or it fills out a url and hits Enter. cf. this `case` statement: https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/bin/hotre...

I wanted to keep /mandatory/ moving parts to a minimum in a hand-rolled setup. So I sort of went hardline about avoiding prerequisites like a server process, and especially a JS client. The xdotool trick worked surprisingly well (for the most part), and so I stuck with it!

> it has been working well in practice for years

This is the holy grail. I really hope I get years-long stability out of it. Based on my experience so far, I feel good about the long-term odds.

> I also have a Makefile for incremental rebuilds, but I would really like to replace that with Ninja.

I was going to write a Makefile at some point. I'll have a look at Ninja. Thanks for the tip!