devd VS serverino

Your technique is one I would turn towards as a developer who understands HTML/CSS flow so much better than I do any typesetting tool. I actually use a very similar technique for managing my CV and generating invoices for clients; I have a little "static site" generator I've written that takes JSON, throws it through a templating engine, and spits out HTML files. I then host a server in the output folder and print-to-pdf directly from there. This approach seems quite rare; I don't think enough people appreciate just how flexible CSS is or its support for common print-related tasks.

There are plenty of solutions to that specific problem. Nowadays, I only work on Nuxt/Next/Astro projects that come with hot reload out of the box so I don't have a need for it anymore, but I have used https://github.com/cortesi/devd a lot in the past, with much success.

A no-install solution would be to use the "workspace" feature of Chrome's Dev Tools:

1. Open your .html file in Chrome.

2. Open the Dev Tools.

3. In the "Sources" tab, activate the "Filesystem" sub-tab.

4. Click on "+ Add folder to workspace" and choose the directory containing your .html and .css files.

5. Edit the .css file with autocompletion and live preview.

6. Save your work so that it is synchronized with your filesystem.

In action: https://i.imgur.com/slcSt9X.gif

Try https://github.com/cortesi/devd

This pair of tools do both front-end and back-end live reloading with a small amount of config: https://github.com/cortesi/modd https://github.com/cortesi/devd

In tandem with https://github.com/cortesi/devd I've found it a good setup for web development.

Modd watches file changes and rebuilds, while Devd enables livereload, letting me make changes in my text editor and then see the rendered changes in the browser, side-by-side, in near real-time.

This is for go web development but I'm pretty sure these two tools are language-agnostic.

My favourite is https://github.com/cortesi/devd