We absolutely love writing plugins, hacking scripts, building themes and more. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said some parts of it isn’t a little cumbersome. One of them is having to constantly refresh a page when you’re working on it.

It isn’t that is it so difficult. People have asked me questions like,

“How difficult can hitting F5 be?”

or

“Hitting F5 doesn’t take more than a second”

Yes. I agree to both statements. However it is troublesome because you often have to switch windows to hit that F5 refresh button. When you’re in your editor, hitting F5 can (sometimes) lead to disastrous results. So there’s actually two things I have to do. Activate the browser window and then hit F5. If you’re doing small tweaks trying to get things *just right*, this can be repeated many times in a short frame of time.

Then, I discovered XRefresh. It is a software that sits on your computer and every time I save my file with the edits, xRefresh will also refresh my browser. Since finding it, I’m hopelessly hooked.

This is one of those things that you don’t really mind doing manually but when you have a tool that can do it automatically, you suddenly realize how much time, typing and effort you’ve spent in the past. XRefresh is free and works on Windows, Linux and OSX. If you work on web sites a lot, you should get it.