Ask HN: App for quickly opening all files and windows necessary for a project | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: App for quickly opening all files and windows necessary for a project

12 pointsgcj9 comments

I remember some time ago I saw someone posting an App for quickly opening all files and windows necessary for a given project. You could, for instance, set it up so, with a single click, you would open your text editor, some terminal windows running a given command, photoshop, some folders, etc.

Does any of you remember what program is that or use some custom solution for the same issue?

It's a huge pain to have to do that every time, specially if you switch between multiple projects

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I don't know the app you're talking about, but I solve this using persistent tmux sessions [1]. I use (Neo)Vim as my text editor, so it's just part of the tmux session. Each project has its own session.

I am aware that this doesn't really help you as your question seems to suggest you are not using an editor that can be run in the terminal.

[1] https://github.com/tmux-plugins/tmux-resurrect

In macOS I've used Keyboard maestro for this. It allows you to define actions you can click in the menu bar as well.

You could also write a simple bash script to do it. If you also like this in the menu bar you can download BitBar which easily lets you put actions into the menu bar via python/bash/etc. I have a lot of stuff like this, very much as project overview and shortcut area.

I write simple bash scripts for this that I put in my path e.g. if you type "project123" in the terminal, it will open the project in VS Code, open the git repo is SourceTree, open the API docs in Chrome, start the local server etc. Usually I make it close all those programs first as well so it's a clean slate.

Pretty simple and really flexible.

Sounds awesome! Can you please share the bash script?

Put a function in your bash profile script along the lines of this, where you open up everything you need for a project to going:

    function project123() {
      path=~/Documents/project123
      cd $path
   
      code $path # open IDE
      stree $path # open SourceTree

      chrome "localhost:8080"&
      gulp # Start local server
    }

Then just type "project123" in bash to run it. Create a new one for each project.

I found https://apps.apple.com/us/app/workspaces/id1219826448?mt=12 recently

Don't know the specific solution you're talking about, but I'm currently making a mac app that handles this.

Open beta this winter.

https://cleave.app

It is probably Workspaces. It is quite limited though, I'm planning to set this up using Alfred on macOS which is using AppleScript under the hood.

You're probably talking about AutoHotKey.

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