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.

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
    guard "-g rails"
  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.

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