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

Solution

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

Comments

[xxjjnn]

I chased an old document which mentioned "set document.browse.refresh = 1", however its "1" (true) by default and its to enable allowing the document to be refreshed by the webpage from javascript, rather than some auto refreshing feature.