Need to restart Ember in order to test front-end changes.
SilK reported needing to restart Ember to test changes made to the front end, which usually only require a page reload. david confirmed that this is not expected behavior and suggested that something is wrong with the environment.
SilK shared the installation guide they followed and mentioned using an Ubuntu subsystem with Windows 11 WSL. After investigating, SilK found the issue to be symbolic links in the environment messing up file change detections. The solution involved moving the directories to the WSL Ubuntu environment and creating Windows symbolic links.
Hey there!
I’ve set up a new dev environment for working on plugins. Discourse is up to date with the main branch.
I need to restart Ember in order to test changes made to the front end. This includes changes to Handlebars, Emberjs, and stylesheets. A few months ago, when I was working on plugins, I only needed to reload the web page to test these changes.
Has something changed in this time? Is this something wrong with my environment?
Any help is much appreciated! 
Changes to frontend code should only require a refresh of the page. In fact, a change to JS code should actually trigger a browser refresh automatically.
So it sounds like something is wrong with your environment. Did you follow one of the development installation guides here on Meta?
That’s along the lines of what I figured it should occur.
This is the installation guide I followed. I should mention I am using an Ubuntu subsystem with Windows 11 WSL.
Ended up finding the issue: My environment had some symbolic links that (I assume) were messing up file change detections.
The discourse and my-plugin directories were under my Windows user, with symbolic links in the WSL Ubuntu (/home/silk/discourse → /mnt/c/Users/SilK/discourse).
The resolution was to have the true directories exist in the WSL Ubuntu environment, and create Windows symbolic links (C:\Users\SilK\discourse → \wsl.localhost\Ubuntu-20.04\home\silk\discourse).