Question

I’m learning to do javascript development with Vim
I would like to know how other people do to preview the result of your javascript code
I can of course manually launch and refresh a browser
but there must be an automatic way

Answer 1

I use xdotool[1] to automate the “switch focus to browser, hit f5” part. All this is in a shell script, say reload.sh, and I call it from vim by mapping like this:

:nmap <C-L> :!reload.sh<CR>

reload.sh (untested, you may need to massage it a bit):

#!/bin/sh
WID=`xdotool search "Mozilla Firefox" | head -1`
xdotool windowactivate --sync $WID
xdotool type f5

[1] http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/