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Comment by CWIZO | Hacker News Reader

It would be even better if it worked the other way around. Tell Chrome where my files are and it would watch them for changes. That way I can use my favourite editor/IDE and get the features you described.

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Looks like it took about 12 hours for them to build, release, then blog about this for you:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+GoogleChromeDevelopers/posts/64...

Anything else you'd like from them while you have their ear?

That's pretty awesome, I don't know if the two actions are related but if they are, it's really good to see the Chrome team:

1) Taking suggestions from sources like this so easily ("Hey, look what I just read on HN, we should do that!")

2) Implementing a change so quickly - most companies as large as Google can take days to approve a change in a product as widely used as Chrome. (I am aware that most users won't use the developer tools, but with any added functionality comes an added unforeseen bug.)

Wow. Really nice!

I wrote an extension that does both live reload and saving from devtools: http://tin.cr. To address the comment below with regard to extensions not working, it's Chrome's fault. It will fail to hotswap JavaScript occasionally and it doesn't communicate the reason to the user or extensions built on top of it.

Speaking from experience, hot swapping JS sounds much better than it actually is in practice. First, as mentioned above it randomly fails with no explanation from Chrome. Also, I find a lot of code I want to hotswap runs on DOM ready and assumes that the page has just been loaded.

On the other hand, CSS hotswapping in Chrome works really well.

"I find a lot of code I want to hotswap runs on DOM ready and assumes that the page has just been loaded."

Maybe it would be possible to put all your "setup" code into a single myscript.load() function and then when you've edited your js in chrome devtools, then call myscript.load() in the console to reboot all your DOM events and so on.

Just an idea, completely not tested.

P.S. Just tried your extension using vim to edit a Sass file, while compass watch is running, and your extension is watching my CSS output directory. Awesome to see changes in vim almost immediately appear in my browser!

EDIT: Formatting. Adding P.S.

I think your extension was one of the few I tried. Sorry for the slight bashing, I appreciate what you're doing and I'd actually like to help you out in any way I can!

Have you tried getting in touch with Chrome developers? Printing out info when hot swapping failed would really make you extension useful.

Weirdly, I haven't noticed failures while using the Chrome editor. Might be that I just haven't logged enough hours with it yet, but so far it was working flawlessly.

It probably works great for games, though put your render() function in the hotswapped code, and hooray. ctrl+s updates the view.

That is fantastic, thank you for this.

We've done that with SCSS/Sass (http://usetakana.com). It's a Sublime plugin that compiles & hot-swaps in your stylesheet changes as you type.

It says "Made for Mac", but as a Sublime plugin would it also work with Windows/Linux versions of Sublime? I'd give it a go, but I'm on Windows.

I agree, that would be useful. There are some extensions out there that try to do just that, but I didn't find them all that useful.

What problems did you encounter with them?

I couldn't find one that worked consistently. Sometimes they detected source code changes and did a hot swap successfully, but other times something went wrong.

And because of this inconsistency I never knew whether I changed the wrong peace of code or the extension didn't do it's job thus making the extension pretty useless...

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