qx
Summary
A simple "productivity booster" tool to quickly run a set of actions.
What? Why?
I'm often switching between projects which can greatly differ.
It can be:
• Game development
• System or tool development
• Web development
• Music making
• Drawing
• Reading
• Learning
• Gaming
• ...other things?
And each time the context switching is not easy, and I would like to have
something to keep me focused when I work on these things.
So here's an example.
Suppose I'm currently developing a Godot game, called "My Game".
When developing this project, I need:
• A VS Code instance opened in the right folder
• A Godot instance opened in the right folder
• A web browser opened to the official Godot Documentation
• Some kind of music (like https://musicforprogramming.net)
Using qx, you can define "environments", containing a set of actions.
Here's a sample for the tasks I described above, as a qx configuration file:
▤ yaml
variables:
my_project_directory: "C:\\godot\\my-game"
environments:
my-game:
actions:
# Open Godot in the project folder
- type: run
target: "C:\\godot\\godot.exe"
working_directory: '${my_project_directory}'
# Open VS Code in the project folder
- type: vscode
target: '${my_project_directory}'
# Open Godot documentation
- type: open_url
target: 'https://docs.godotengine.org'
# Open some music
- type: open_url
target: 'https://musicforprogramming.net'
Now, I can type qx my-game.
I can also type qx m, because I only have one environment in my list that
matches m.
And that's it.
What ? You are on Windows and you don't want to use the terminal ?
Type Win+R, then qx m in the "Execute" window.
And if you want, you can also use a terminal user interface by typing qx -i.