Erik Zaadi

The tales of a developer with passion for dad jokes

How to Use Zsh and Tmuxp to Speed Up Your Day to Day Workflow

Published - 2020-02-17 | 1min

I’m a heavy terminal user.

I admit it.

I’ve always loved the streamlined workflows of elegant TUI (AKA TEXT USER INTERFACE FTW).

It’s one of the things that made me switch to vim all those years ago.

In addition, I’m addicted to tmux and zsh, which I use daily.

Anyhuze

In my day to day job, I continuously need to switch between several applications that I might work on, some of them in separate repositories, some even in a monorepo (!).

To make this more productive, I use the following flow:

I have preconfigured tmuxp sessions as following:

standaloneapp.yml

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---
session_name: "${APP}"
shell_command_before: "nvm use ${NODE_VERSION:-default}"
start_directory: "${WORKSOURCEDIR}/${APP}"
windows:
  - panes:
      - vim
    window_name: editor
  - panes:
      - git status
    window_name: shell
  - layout: even-horizontal
    panes:
      - yarn test --watch
    window_name: tests

and monorepoapp.yml

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---
session_name: "${APP}"
shell_command_before: "nvm use ${NODE_VERSION:-default}"
start_directory: "${WORKSOURCEDIR}/mymonorepo/packages/${APP}"
windows:
  - panes:
      - vim
    window_name: editor
  - panes:
      - git status
    window_name: shell
  - layout: even-horizontal
    panes:
      - yarn test --watch
    window_name: tests

Which I can invoke with a simple

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APP=myapp tmuxp load standaloneapp
# or
APP=mypackage tmuxp load monorepoapp
# or if with a special node version
APP=myapp NODE_VERSION=v12 tmuxp load standaloneapp

To improve this even MOAR:

I have the following zsh aliases to shorten things:

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alias ms="tmuxp load -y"
wo()
{
    APP=$1 NODE_VERSION=${2:-default} ms standaloneapp
}

mwo(){
    APP=$1 NODE_VERSION=${2:-default} ms monorepoapp
}

Which allows me to do just:

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wo myapp
# or 
mwo mypackage
# or for that special node version app
wo myapp v12

AND FINALLY

How could we possibly get along without some sweet tab completions?

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compdef '_path_files -/ -W ${WORKSOURCEDIR}/mymonorepo/packages' mwo
compdef '_path_files -/ -W ${WORKSOURCEDIR}' wo

mic drop

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