Yes, but that’s not a problem, it is a few lines of javascript. websockets and event sources can both connect to localhost too so it doesn’t have to be the server per se, it can be some other little command forwarder - including one that responds to SIGUSR1 if you want, though I think signals are a pain in the butt and I’d rather just use a directory watcher in the code itself. Of course, you could also set up something with ui automation to hit the refresh button on the browser too.

It takes like a couple lines of generic javascript and a dozen or two lines of D (or surely similar in your language of choice) to make it happen.

So yeah, nice that dillo has it built in now but not really new or unique. Alternatively, you can put a page on a meta refresh timer of a few seconds and just constantly be reloading so any time you glance over at it, it will be pretty recent, though this is a pain in its own way.

Here, I’ll show you right here how I might do it:

// paste this in your site while you work on it
var es = new EventSource("http://localhost:2299/");
es.addEventListener("refresh", function() { location.reload(); });

the JS is legit that simple. The actual watcher is a lil more involved but really not bad.

shared static this() {
      // need a thread cuz of a quirk of my library, on my list to fix this
      // but haven't gotten around to it yet
        import core.thread;
        new Thread(() {
                import arsd.core;
               // the files you listen to could be passed from the cmd line or something instead
                auto dw = new DirectoryWatcher(FilePath("/var/www/htdocs"), "reloader.html", false, (mod, op) {
                        EventSourceServer.sendEvent("reloader", "refresh", "{}", 0);
                });

                getThisThreadEventLoop().run(() => false);
        }).start;

}

import arsd.cgi;
void handler(Cgi cgi) {
    // need to allow cross-domain things for the EventSource to pull from localhost
        cgi.setResponseHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
        cgi.setResponseHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET");
        if(cgi.requestMethod == Cgi.RequestMethod.GET) {
                EventSourceServer.adoptConnection(cgi, "reloader");
        }
}
mixin GenericMain!handler;

Even working around the quirks in my library, this isn’t a lot of code, and I expect Go, Node, and other popular things can do it similarly shortly.

Again, I think Dillo’s new feature is cool, and composing it with other shell commands is a neat trick, but the functionality itself isn’t game changing.