I think GWT is supposed to automatically pick up and reload changes to the app-wide HTML and CSS files, which reside in the webapp folder. However, in my case this is simply not the case and GWT says "skipped compile because no input files have changed". I am not sure where I should edit to let those files be watched as well.
This project was initialized using the old gwt-maven plugin from https://gwt-maven-plugin.github.io/gwt-maven-plugin/user-guide/archetype.html.
The program arguments on launch is the following: -war app/target/App-1.0-SNAPSHOT -remoteUI "${gwt_remote_ui_server_port}:${unique_id}" -startupUrl index.html -logLevel INFO -codeServerPort 9997 -port 8888 com.example.www.App.App.
Or did I simply not understand it correctly and GWT is just not supposed to watch for changes in the webapp folder? This would really hinder the pace of frontend development.
GWT compiles .java (input) files to javascript.
So if you only modify a css file there is no need to recompile to js.
However, when creating the war file, files in public dir may be updated.