Live Preview

During the minimize memory project I was regularly checking the generated documentation to check how it appeared with the code.

Doing that multiple times I quickly started to think how I could have the documents open and have them refreshed when any changed appeared.

Implementation

This was mostly an integration job. I also used literate programming since I thought it would be a smaller and more contained example.

To check when the files are changed and trigger an action I used the inotifywait from inotify-tools.

Since the documentation was built with html I started searching for a browser that allowed me to refresh the page when a modification in a file were detected.

After searching for a bit I found that the suckless project, surf browser allows the refresh of the current page when he receives a SIGHUP signal.

With these I made a simple bash script that receives the file to open the browser with and the files to monitor. When any of the files suffers changes it will trigger a SIGHUP signal to surf telling him to refresh the page.

Result

It was fast to do and gave me a really nice tool to preview in real time my changes. Check the workflow.

And here the full demo.

Literate Programming

Since it was done with literate programming the documents/program can be seen in here

Repository

If you want to see the code or to try the tool check the repository.