One of the greatest things to happen to modern web development is tools like grunt and livereload that can be configured to run tasks (or reload the browser) automagically upon changes to certain files.

While grunt and livereload are great, they do require a certain amount of work to get started with (especially grunt). I sometimes feel uncomfortable using live reload because I haven’t donated/bought it, so I often look for solutions that are somewhat simpler (and don’t make you feel quite so guilty).

One of the solutions I stumbled upon was the use of the mozrepl firefox plugin along with this gist submitted by @nonsequitur on github. This setup achieves the goal of refresh-on-save very very easily and most importantly, simply.

Note that you will need firefox, mozrepl plugin for firefox, emacs (24, for easy installation of the moz package), and the moz package for emacs.

I’ve combined (and added a small change to) the two relevant gists created by @nonsequitur here:

Oh and if you aren’t already using and loving helm-mode, you should.