How do I periodically reload a web page in a Terminal web browser?

Question

How do I schedule the reloading of a page when using a terminal browser?

using any of: Elinks, w3m etc

Answer 1

As far as I know, these browsers do not support programmed reloading, however it can easily be accomplished by using a terminal multiplexer like tmux. For example if you start the browser in one terminal like this:

tmux new-session -s browse 'w3m google.com'

Then you can send commands to it from a script or another terminal with the send-keys command. So to make w3m reload the current page do this:

tmux send-keys -t browse R

Answer 2

Unlike Lynx the w3m browser can reload a page, when the page has the meta-refresh tag in its header. You just have to enable it in w3m's config file: Look for "meta_refresh 0" and change the value to "1": https://www.computerhilfen.de/english/w3m-browser-activate-meta-refresh.html

If a webpage has the meta-refresh-tag, it will reload it with the given time: Here the time is three seconds and the URL is https://askubuntu.com:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3; URL=https://askubuntu.com">