Reload Browser from Vim

I’ve been experimenting with external scripts to make my daily Vim more enjoyable. One of my pain points as a web developer is constantly refreshing the browser after editing a file. I finally got fed up with hitting ⌘+Tab dozens of times a day and pulled out some AppleScript.

Here’s all the code you need to tell Safari to reload the current page:

tell application "Safari"
  set sameURL to URL of current tab of front window
  set URL of current tab of front window to sameURL
end tell

If you use Chrome you can use this instead:

tell application "Google Chrome" to reload active tab of window 1

Here’s how we hook up the keybinding in Vim:

function! ReloadBrowser()
  silent !osascript ~/.vim/refresh-safari.applescript
endfunction
nnoremap <silent> <leader>rs :call ReloadBrowser()<CR>

Using this script I was able to turn ⌘+Tab, ⌘+r, ⌘+Tab into <leader>+rs. I’ve been using it for about a week and it feels great. LiveReload will afford even greater ease, but you don’t always have the luxury of installing it and this will work for any project.