One Action, Multiple Terminal Windows Running Stuff

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Many development environments require running things in a terminal window. npm run start, or whatever. I know my biggest project requires me to be running a big fancy Docker-based thing in one terminal, Ruby on Rails in another, and webpack in another. I’ve worked on other projects that require multiple terminal windows as well, and I don’t feel like I’m that unusual. I’ve heard from several others in this situation. It’s not a bad situation, it’s just a little cumbersome and annoying. I’ve got to remember all the commands and set up my command line app in a way that feels comfortable. For me, splitting panels is nicer than tabs, although tabs for separate projects seems OK.

I asked the question on Twitter, of course. I figured I’d compile the options here.

• tmux was the most popular answer. I’m very sure I don’t understand all it can do, but I think I understand that it makes “fake” panes within one terminal session that emulates multiple panes. So, those multiple panes can be configured to open and run different commands simultaneously. I found this interesting because it came literally days later my CodePen co-founder let us all know the new dev environment he’s been working on will use tmux.
  • Here’s an example configuration for tmux.
  • tmuxinator gives it better configuration, I guess?
• I was pointed to kitty by a fella who told me it feels like a grown-up tmux to him. It can be configured into layouts with commands that run at startup.
• There are native apps for all the platforms that can run multiple panels.
  • macOS: I’ve long used iTerm which does split panels nicely. It can also remember window arrangements, which I’ve used, but I don’t see any built-in option for triggering commands in that arrangement. The native terminal can do tabs and splitting, too, but it feels very limited.
  • Linux: Terminator
  • Windows: The default terminal has panes.
• There are npm things for running multiple scripts, like concurrently and npm-run-all, but (I think?) they are limited to running only npm scripts, rather than any terminal command. Maybe you can make npm scripts for those other commands? But even then, I don’t think you’d see the output in different panels, so it’s probably best for scripts that are run-and-done instead of run-forever.

Being a Mac guy, I was most interested in solutions that would work with iTerm since I’ve used that anyway. In lieu of a built-in iTerm solution, I did learn it was “scriptable.” Apparently, they are sunsetting AppleScript support in favor of Python but, hey, for now it seems to work fine.

It’s basically this:

tell application "iTerm"
	
  tell current window
		
    create window with default profile
    tell current session of current tab
      set name to "run.sh"
      write text "cd '/Users/chriscoyier/GitHub/CPOR'"
      write text "./run.sh"
    end tell
		
    create tab with default profile
    tell current session of current tab
      set name to "Rails"
      write text "cd '/Users/chriscoyier/GitHub/CPOR'"
      write text "nvm use"
      write text "yarn"
      write text "bundle install"
      write text "yarn run rails"
    end tell
		
    create tab with default profile
    tell current session of current tab
      set name to "webpack"
      write text "cd '/Users/chriscoyier/GitHub/CPOR'"
      write text "nvm use"
      write text "yarn"
      write text "yarn run dev"
    end tell
		
    # split vertically
    # tell application "System Events" to keystroke "d" using command down
    # delay 1
		
    # split horizontally
    # tell application "System Events" to keystroke "d" using {shift down, command down}
    # delay 1
		
    # moving... (requires permission)
    # tell application "System Events" to keystroke "]" using command down
		
    end tell
	
end tell

I just open that script, hit run, and it does the job. I left the comments in there because I’d like to figure out how to get it to do split screen the way I like, rather than tabs, but I got this working and then got lazy again. It felt weird to have to use keystrokes to have to do it, so I figured if I was going to dig in, I’d figure out if their newer Python stuff supports it more directly or what. It’s also funny I can’t like compile it into a little mini app or something. Can’t Automator do that? Shrug.

The other popular answer I got for Mac folks is that they have Alfred do the work. I never got into Alfred, but there clearly is fancy stuff you can do with it.

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