Terminal workflow automation with Terminitor | Hacker News Reader

Terminal workflow automation with Terminitor

jeffkreeftmeijer.com

56 pointsjkreeftmeijer16 comments

This only works on OS X because of the dependency on applescript. It would presumably not be impossible to port this to Linux or Windows, and of course patches and suggestions are welcome.

Seems like a project someone hacked one afternoon. Reminds me of how I started TracShell. Even now I'm not sure it even works on anything else except *nix (although theoretically it should).

Nice idea though. Hopefully they've clearly separated the platform dependent bits so that back-ends for other desktop environments can be written (ie: Gnome, KDE, Explorer, etc).

Really? Why the downvote? It's a cool utility!

Yeah, we are aware of the limitations and actually we did start this project over an afternoon. We thought it would be cool to have our terminal setup automated so we packaged this up as a gem. Our intent is to absolutely extract things into adapters to make this dead easy to port to linux and windows. Heres the issue for it on github which we plan to tackle soon: http://github.com/achiu/terminitor/issues#issue/5

Sweet. Cheers.

Sounds like a nice idea, although bash and GNU screen should also work. Or didn't I get the point?

You got it; they're duplicating screen features. The tradeoff of recreating it (incompletely) is that the configuration is much more straightforward.

I have really handy screen macros that split screens, set hardstatus window titles, and setup different workflows after autodetecting the kind of project the base directory contains, but it's all done through shell functions and `screen -X eval` `process` this and `register` that.

http://superuser.com/questions/94612/macros-in-gnu-screen

GNU screen is a more powerful tool, but at the cost of having to read through the documentation. I can forgive someone for wanting to skip that step.

(but you shouldn't; terminal multiplexers are good for your health)

Same thought here. And since he's using OS X, I wonder if he knows about terminal groups?

Or one can just use a tiling WM like dwm, xMonad, or stumpwm.

It seems that Terminator fills the void where a user wants to have tiling terminals, but can't because Mac OS X, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't allow one to fiddle with the windowing system to the same extreme that X does.

Terminal groups (built in to OS X terminals since at least Tiger) do enable tiling terminals. And the options are pretty extensive - to give a very rough idea in case you don't have access to a copy of OS X, there are eight different tabs, each a pane full of various options, in Terminal preferences. But yeah X is probably even more extreme than this.

I installed this the other day, and despite it's shortcomings I like it. As others have pointed out, you can achieve the same effect with several apps, but it's simple and easily configurable, with minimal friction to productivity. It fills a little gap in the steps I take when starting work on a project (tail various logs, start a compass watch process, kick off a mysql session etc).

Two changes would make it even more useful to me: - The ability to specify an arbitrary config file location (I'd like to keep it in config/ in my projects) - The ability to specify the tab names in that config file (I'm on Leopard and I know this isn't as straightforward as it should be)

All in all though, I'd say congrats to the authors on a nice little idea.

I have trouble reading this page because the background image makes me feel like I'm going to fall if I don't look at it.

That sounds a lot like expect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect ) unless I've missed something. If you use autoexpect, it'll even automagically generate the script for you by capturing what you type in to the shell.

Terminal workflow automation? too much kool aid :)

I'm using this gem, is very handy, but it is not a workflow.

Perhaps not yet, but we'd like it to get there. Perhaps the name was too ambitious until we really fleshed out some of the nicer features we have in store.

Tabs, on terminals?

If I understand correctly, a tiling window manager combined with a shell script is basically the same thing?

I will be trying this out! thanks for the great work.

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