dotfiles

There are a few projects I have where I need to work from two separate directories simultaneously, and while there are a number of ways I could set up workspaces in various esoteric IDEs or terminal session managers, I am stodgy in my ways and enjoy using the built-in Terminal in macOS for most things. If you use iTerm on the Mac, the commands are similar, but the AppleScript events that I use may need to be adjusted.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. For these projects, I want to have a bash/zsh alias that does the following:

1. When I type xyz (alias) and hit 'return'
2. Open the current tab to path ~/projects/xyz
3. Open a new tab next to this tab
4. Change directories in then new tab to path ~/something-else/xyz

Simple enough, you say, but I found that a number of AppleScript incantations (e.g. do script and the like) could not be made to work with bash aliases easily. In the end, I put the following in my .zshrc file (see all of geerlingguy's dotfiles here—some private aliases excluded):

For all the sites I maintain, I have at least a local and production environment. Some projects warrant a dev, qa, etc. as well, but for the purposes of this post, let's just assume you often run drush commands on local or development environments during development, and eventually run a similar command on production during a deployment.

What happens if, at some point, you are churning through some Drush commands, using aliases (e.g. drush @site.local break-all-the-things to break things for testing), and you accidentally enter @site.prod instead of @site.local? Or what if you were doing something potentially disastrous, like deleting a database table locally so you can test a module install file, using drush sqlq to run a query?

I have over 100 git repositories on my Mac, and for almost every one, I sometimes browse the directory structure in the Finder. Once I do that, I inevitably end up with a few pesky .DS_Store files that want to be added to my repo:

.DS_Store files don't add anything of value to my code (they just tell Mac OS X about folder display and icons), so I always end up adding them to my own projects' .gitignore files. But when I'm working on other repositories (like Drupal, or a fork from GitHub) I don't want to add a .gitignore if none exists, or mess with the project's existing .gitignore. So what's a coder to do?

There are a couple good solutions: