Feature idea: Reload button (or auto hot-reloading?)

[gorjious]

I find myself constantly through the cycle of exporting from Glyphs then going through the Type-X menu to select the newly exported font and then wait to see the changes.

1. Click Type-X icon
2. Select Font
3. Click upload icon
4. Select font file
5. Click open
6. Click somewhere to close Type-X menu

It is actually quite a lot of steps if you do it constantly. I've set up shortcuts that replicate this process but I wonder if it would be possible to include a Reload button that will essentially know which font is activated and reload that font. If this Reload button could be triggered by a shortcut then that would make it even faster to test/retest fonts.

[arrowtype]

Ohhh this is a really great idea. It would make this a much more seamless tool for a type design workflow.

The only other way to improve it might be if type-x could actually make it automatic, watching for the file to change, and hot-reloading when it does. But, I suspect that might be limited by browser/OS security. If so, a reload button w/ shortcuts would be the next best thing.

[gorjious]

Automatic would be terrific, especially if there is a 2nd monitor so that after export, all you have to do is look to the browser screen and see the change. However, there is something to reloading manually and watching the change occur.

Ideally, the per-tab feature for A/B testing is a better gauge to see how something changes.

If automatic is possible then there would be a conflict with the per-tab A/B testing idea because how would you decide what is automatically updated.

Maybe there could be a way to switch between automatic/manual modes since both can be used for different purposes.

[justinpenner]

Agreed, this would be my top feature request for Type-X. An option to auto-reload fonts would be useful, as would a manual refresh button.

I'd imagine a manual refresh button next to each font in the list, next to the expand/collapse toggle, so it can be done in 2 clicks. I'd guess that most users using the auto-reload setting would want it applied to all fonts, so a toggle for global auto-reload could be somewhere below the list of fonts. You could still have individual toggles for each font to auto-reload, but toggling the global setting would override them all.

[RoelN]

I'm pretty sure auto-reload isn't going to work, as extensions aren't allowed to watch the user's filesystem. This would mean the extension can never be made aware of changes to the font file. The extensions I found that do offer some kind of "hot reloading" need a server to run in the background, which does the actual watching. This would be possible for Type-X too, but require a lot more work (especially to create versions for all OSes).

A manual refresh button might have a better chance at succeeding (not sure about permissions etc. for file uploads triggered from code), which would eliminate step 3 to 6 in @gorjious post.

[arrowtype]

@simoncozens was able to implement this in #129.

However, it only works while the extension popup is actively open. So, this is a bit of a weird UX pattern, as the current design assumes the extension will mostly be minimized after settings have been tweaked, to allow reading/browsing.

This might be solvable through some semi-involved UI refactoring... I’m imagining something like a minimized state of the popup, like a little action button on the side or in a corner of the viewport.

Here’s a vague idea of what I mean (note the little hanging tab on the right edge of the viewport):

However, that would also require some kind of "minimize" button in the main popup, and more to the point, that might also mean totally refactoring this to be an injected element, rather than a typical extension popup.html... and maybe then it also turns into more of an item bound to a single, specific tab, rather than something at the browser level... so this potentially starts to get pretty involved, pretty quickly. Just writing down the idea for the future.