watch-mode puts you in control of time!

By André A. Gomes

The ubiquitous cron job of the UN*X world is named after Chronos, the Greek word for time or the personification of time in the Greek mythology. It comes in handy whenever a repetitive task needs to be scheduled.

Nyxt sets itself apart from other browsers by elevating your control to that of the highest gods! Meet the new watch mode – a mode that lets you reload a buffer at regular time intervals.

Plenty of use cases come to mind – daily updating your favourite news or weather provider, monitoring the metrics of jobs or processes through a web interface, or convincing your peers that you're a medium and that your browser reads your mind.

How to Use It?

Simply hover to the desired buffer and enable watch-mode. You'll be prompted to choose the units of time and specify them. Notice that you can select as many units of time as you desire. If, for obscure reasons, you need to update a given buffer every 2 seconds, 12 minutes, 5 hours and 1 day, please help yourself! At the last prompt confirm by hitting the Return key. You can interrupt the scheduling by disabling watch-mode in its respective buffer.

You start by selecting which intervals of time you are interested in updating on:

Then, you select the amount of time for each unit:

Now, your buffer will reload as necessary!

Emergent Properties

Nyxt provides atomic units of functionality to its users. In turn, new emergent patterns come to light when they're composed together. Concretely, can you feel the joy of coupling auto-mode and watch-mode? Recall that watch-mode defines its scheduling for each buffer. Meaning that when auto-mode is activated, you can have that same behaviour replicated in future Nyxt sessions. Please refer to previous article on auto-mode if you missed it.

Watch-mode is yet another small step towards being able to quickly define workflows that adapt to your needs.

Thanks for reading :-)