npm start should reuse the currently open tab

[gaearon]

It is annoying to restart and have a new tab opened every time.
I’m not sure how to do it but we should try to refresh the existing tab instead of opening a new one.

[vjeux]

Yeah, there's an issue on Chrome where they don't want to implement that feature, but I've read that you can use applescript in order to do that. @frantic is doing something similar for the react native chrome debugger opening.

[gaearon]

There’s also a Chrome extension that does it out of the box.
Maybe we can point people to it, assuming it’s easy to install: https://github.com/mbhutton/chrome-duplicate-tab-detector

[gaearon]

(We can also add something like this to React DevTools, assuming the port is more specific so we’re not handling false positives. Most people developing on React already have React DevTools.)

[vjeux]

facebook/react-native#3394

[vjeux]

Here's the applescript that keeps the current tab: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/f03c7b59fd8962682cff5797a3916882ef389871/packager/launchChromeDevTools.applescript

They replaced it with opn but check on the devserver if the tab with the websocket is already opened. Unfortunately we can't do that here because we don't maintain a running server.

[gaearon]

It’s not very nice to force people to use Chrome. After all our friends at Mozilla are building new Firefox debugger with React 😄 . Maybe there is some way to check if Chrome is the default browser?

[vjeux]

Absolutely, my previous solution checked if Chrome was opened before running it and the current one uses the default browser

[gaearon]

👍 We could then combine your check with AppleScript and fallback to opn.