Reload the Active Tab in Chrome with AppleScript

This is a revisited/simplified version of this old post.


You can get more scripts like this from Saekiさん's post

Switching back to the previous application with AppleScript

If you want to simulate cmd + tab with AppleScript, here it is

tell application "System Events"
  tell process "finder"
    activate
    keystroke tab using {command down}
  end tell
end tell

You can use the same thing in bash

echo 'tell application "System Events"
  tell process "finder"
    activate
    keystroke tab using {command down}
  end tell
end tell' | osascript

Resize and position windows with AppleScript

-- get the dimensions of the desktop, set up few variables
tell application "Finder"
 set displayAreaDimensions to bounds of window of desktop
 set x1 to item 1 of displayAreaDimensions
 set y1 to item 2 of displayAreaDimensions
 set x2 to item 3 of displayAreaDimensions
 set y2 to item 4 of displayAreaDimensions
end tell

set width to x2 - x1
set height to y2 - y1

-- positioning iTunes, make it fullscreen
tell application "iTunes"
 set the bounds of the first window to {x1, y1, x2, y2}
end tell

-- positioning Safari, halfwidth on the right
tell application "Safari"
 set the bounds of the first window to {x1 + width / 2, y1, x2, y2}
end tell

-- positioning iTerm
tell application "iTerm"
 set the bounds of the first window to {x1, y1, x1 + 1000, y1 + 600}
end tell

There are few useful blogposts about the topic.
www.ithug.com/2007/09/applescript-moving-and-resizing-windows or
www.ithug.com/2008/12/applescript-arranging-multiple-windows/

or you can use Divvy, which is an amazing window management app.

Reload the browser when files change on OSX

Web front-end development often looks like this, you change the code, which can be HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby whatever and then you head over to the browser and reload it to see the changes.

This is not a big deal, but what if the browser could automatically does the reload.

My solution has three parts.

1. You can detect file change with Kicker.


2. Set the focus to the browser and reload it with AppleScript.


3. Set the focus back to your texteditor.

Let's combine these

kicker -e "osascript reload-browser.applescript;focus-textmate.applescript" FOLDER_TO_WATCH

In my case this looks like this

kicker -e "osascript ~/workspace/MacGyver/reload-browser.applescript;osascript ~/workspace/MacGyver/focus-textmate.applescript" src/


You can find the reload_browser.applescript here and the focus-textmate.applescript here.

Open a new tab with AppleScript in Chrome

tell application "Google Chrome"
 set myTab to make new tab at end of tabs of window 1
 set URL of myTab to "http://google.com"
end tell

more AppleScript Chrome goodies at http://laclefyoshi.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-chrome-ver.html

Reload the browser with AppleScript

This post is obsoleted, here is the new simplified version.

AppleScript is a weird language but you still can do cool things with it.

tell application "Google Chrome"
        activate
end tell

tell application "System Events"
 tell process "Google Chrome"
  keystroke "r" using {command down}
 end tell
end tell

Please feel free to replace "Google Chrome" with your choice.

https://github.com/yikulju/MacGyver/blob/master/reload-browser.applescript