keep

A collection of helper utilities for working in the shell. Useful for quickly storing commands and directories from the commandline, so you can come back to them later.

Inspirations

At work, I've often found myself working on one project for a long time, accumulating a series of commands I use frequently to operate in that development environment, then context switching to a different project for a few months. When I find myself coming back to that first project, I've lost all context on what the important commands are, what paths are important, etc. So I wrote this tool as a way of managing these workspaces from the commandline with a uniform interface.

There are two main concepts here: doing commands and going to directories. Both of these are things that can be done within the context of a workspace.

Because I work on conhost (and tangentially to cmd.exe, but mostly to just people no we can't add that), these are scripts built for cmd. They don't work with powershell. I'm sure they could, but I don't really care to make that happen. I work in cmd, so these work in cmd.

Commands

#work

Lists all of your workspaces, or switch to a new workspace. Workspaces have a root directory that they automatically switch you to, and they can be set up with an initial command to run. This can be helpful for running setup commands that you might want to everytime you load that workspace. For example, setting environment variables, running git status, setting a color scheme with colortool, etc.

#stash and #do

#stash <commandline> is used to store a command from the commandline.

#do <command id> lets you execute a saved command

#keep and #go

#keep <path> is used to store a directory from the commandline. Use #keep . to keep the current working directory.

#go <directory id> takes you to a given directory.

Others

#new <path> <workspace name> creates a new workspace #backend will print the path to the backend file, so you can try editing it by hand. #list prints out all the directories and the commands for the current workspace.

Notes

When keeping a directory or stashing a command, cmd is going to try and evaluate any environment variables before the command/directory is saved. So if you want to keep the %USERPROFILE% directory, then you'll actually need to run #keep %%USERPROFILE%%, using the double '%' chars to escape the evaluation. On the way out, cmd is going to expand them again. So if %%USERPROFILE%% is kept as directory #1, #go 1 will try to change directory to C:\Users\<your username> (or whatever %userprofile% is set to).