Support live reload

[maralorn]

When you iterate over your zettels in an editor and use "rib -wS" it might be nice to have the browser live reload changes.
I use https://livejs.com/ in a similar project and that works quite nicely and simple. Of course this should be strictly optionial. The only question is where exactly to add the flag as for this to work we need to change the compilation output of the zettels.

[srid]

Related: #75

[srid]

UX ideas here.

[maralorn]

Wow, that looks amazing. I wonder if we could throw this together with the lsp support (#213) we were talking about?

The point here is rib -wS watches files right? But a language server get's the code of the current file somehow transmitted (before it's saved). So if we could integrate that with "-wS" we could make a language server that continuously offers the file over http. Now, if we want to reload on nearly every keypress live.js might actually be to slow and we maybe need a websocket to trigger reloads?

Also I don‘t know if the language server protocol has a concept of focused file and scroll position.

[maralorn]

Hm, if we don't have the scroll position from the editor we can always focus the last change made.

[sureyeaah]

@maralorn Better yet we could focus on the current cursor position (which LSP supports).

[maralorn]

Uh, I didn‘t know. How great.

[srid]

A basic version of this can be implemented using the reload tool.

nix-env -if https://github.com/srid/reload/archive/nixify.tar.gz
neuron rib -w  # Leave running in another terminal
reload -b -d ~/zettelkasten/.neuron/output

We basically have to replace rib's server with this one.

---

Later, once LSP support is in, we can do cool stuff like auto-scrolling to current cursor position (discussed above).

[fiatjaf]

In my opinion this is unnecessary and a distraction.
Live-reload for text rendered on a default template? It makes no sense.

[srid]

@fiatjaf As a prototype, I'd like to see something like this but possibly as a separate tool (outside of neuron). What I'd like is a browser "mirror" for my neovim session. If I have 3 split windows, for example, the browser mirror (a chrome tab) should also display 3 split windows in exact split configuration. If I scroll the neovim buffer, I'd like the browser window to scroll too (commonmark-hs's sourcepos can be used for it). The idea is to always have a rendered snapshot of your neovim view to the side.

[srid]

Demo here (it doesn't do split mirroring): https://github.com/iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim#introduction

[srid]

cf. #496 (comment)

[srid]

Using parcel,

neuron gen -w # in other terminal
parcel .neuron/output/index.html --open

gives you a reloading static html server.

[srid]

Swapping out neuron's server with ema will give us live reload for free.