UNIX way to live preview AsciiDoc

AsciiDoc is a nice markup language and I am slowly migrating my documents from various flavours of Markdown to the AsciiDoc.

For converting I prefer AsciiDoctor. Ruby AsciiDoctor implementation seems more robust and modern than original Perl implementation. I edit AsciiDoc documents in TextMate with a AsciiDoc-TextMate-2 plugin. It is a fork of great plugin by mattneub and it is slightly modified for my demands (syntax, AsciiDoctor support).

There are three ways to get a HTML webpage from the document:

1. Launch a command to get a notes.html file:

    asciidoctor notes.adoc
   

2. Use Ctrl+Shift+H shortcut to regenerate html from the current document.

3. Use a live reload preview feature.

I love an idea of a live preview and I am using it at my LaTeX workflow.

Official documentation suggests several ways to track changes in editing document and reload a browser. They seems a little complex and insecure for me (browser extensions) so I used a simple shell command:

fswatch -o notes.adoc | xargs -L1 sh -c "asciidoctor notes.adoc && chrome-cli reload"

Utility fswatch is a cross-platform wrapper for file notifications. Each file change is propagated to the asciidoctor command and then to the chrome-cli utility (AppleScript chrome wrapper) that reloads a current tab emits characters for each file change. That is it. You launch a command in a shell only when you need it and then terminate with Ctrl+C.

The best way may be an active browser reloading from TextMate plugin using chrome-cli command but it is not very portable between browsers. Unfortunately built-in open command (xdg-open analogue) does not know about browser internals and cannot reload a tab or even open document in a current tab.