iTermWindow

Make iTerm obey your command! Start up your complex development environment quickly and easily.

The typical Rails project requires three or tour terminal windows/tabs open at once:

• The Rails app itself running using rails s
• Two continuous testing environments, powered by Guard or Autotest, running on your Ruby and JavaScript code
• A console ready for committing code or other maintenance tasks
• A log file or two

Opening all the necessary terminals, starting the right processes in each, and making them easily identifiable is a long, slow process when done by hand. But guess what -- computers can be used to automate processes that otherwise would be laborious when done manually!

Enter iTermWindow, a terminal window/tab multiplexer and command runner for Mac OS X and iTerm, the really awesome Terminal.app replacement. iTerm's scriptability and customization allows one to create complex project configurations for one's terminal setups.

gem install itermwindow or add it to your Gemfile.

The iterm-window executable will open and run an iTermfile file in the current directory. An iTermfile file looks like this:

open :dir => Dir.pwd do
  default_tab :console

  open_tab :rails, :color => :rails do
    rails "s"
  end

  open_tab :rspec, :color => :rspec do
    guard "-g rspec"
  end

  open_tab :log, :color => "DDB" do
    tail "+F -fr log/sphinx.log"
  end
end

In a nutshell:

• open blocks open new iTerm windows.
• current blocks use the cirrent iTerm window.
  • Inside open or current blocks you can open a new tab with open_tab.
  • Specify a tab to be the selected tab with default_tab.
    • Inside of a tab, you can write text into the terminal with write_text.
    • Set the title of the tab with set_title.
    • Or run a command magically (using method_missing).

open_tab and default_tab can take an options hash:

• :dir changes to the given directory before executing commands.
• :color changes the window chrome and tab color to the given hex code (3 or 6 hex digits) or built-in color. See ItermWindow.colors for the list of available colors.

open can also take an options hash:

• :dir changes all tabs to the given directory before executing commands.

You can define your own tab commands with ItermWindow.add_command:

ItermWindow.add_command :guard do |group = nil|
  command = "bundle exec guard"
  command << " -g #{group}" if group
  write_text command
end

open do
  default_tab do
    guard :rails
  end
end

More docs coming soon! Also, look at lib/iterm_window.rb for more usage examples.

• Developed March 17, 2008 by Chris Powers
• Extended June 2011 and beyond by John Bintz and (hopefully) many others