How to spend less time waiting for Play! Framework to compile while coding

A colleague just pointed this cool tip out to me:

play ~run

If you enter “play help“, it says: “~ <command> Executes the specified command whenever source files change.”

So what this does – and how it saves you time – is: it compiles when you save, so that by the time you hit reload in the browser, if you are lucky, it will have already compiled.

This saves me a few seconds each time I switch to the browser to check out my most recent changes.