I've found that saving code, and refreshing the browser, then going back to code, then going back to the browser, is a terribly inefficient practice and horrible for flow. If you're finding yourself having to do this so often as to require a vim hack, you're doing something wrong.
Something like autotest for ruby projects, and cucumber / selenium etc should be making sure your code does what it is supposed to.
Horrible for code, maybe. For doing design with CSS(/Sass/etc) though it's essential.
I do :w, Alt-Tab, Ctrl-R constantly when I'm doing design. I'm constantly testing little changes. This looks like it could be quite a useful little hack.
Correct, I think for the most part it would be a bad way to test code. The only reason I included *.erb is for when I am editing the content/design of a page. Like changing a h2 to a h3 or something like that.
Something like autotest for ruby projects, and cucumber / selenium etc should be making sure your code does what it is supposed to.