Developer productivity 2023

My dotfiles contains everything below, the windows folder differs greatly because it’s windows specific but the rest of the folders are pretty much just copies of eachother with some slight variations.

Navigation between projects

When you’re working with multiple projects, having a fast and easy way to switch between projects is essential for having a smooth and productive workflow. I’ve been using ThePrimeagen’s tmux-sessionizer for a couple of years on MacOS and Linux, which makes it super nice to switch between projects through just a keyboard shortcut and the tmux-session is exactly the same as it was when you left it.

On Windows I haven’t found a good way of replicating this workflow, since there isn’t really a tmux alternative for powershell. Instead I have opted for a slightly subpar solution using the new windows terminal, that opens a new tab for the chosen project.

Windows

Using the new windows terminal, navigate to a project in a new tab and open visual studio with the .sln file that can be found in that specific folder.

Demo of this workflow in the gif below.

Step by step

Start with an empty terminal.

Press <C-f> (configurable, we’ll get to that later) to get to the fuzzy search (fzf).

Fuzzy search the folder/project you want to navigate to. In the example below I search for tes and fzf will make a best guess which project you want to select. If it’s not the chosen one, either keep typing or use the arrow keys to navigate.

Select the chosen one with enter. A new tab will open in the windows terminal in your selected folder/project.

Use the alias vs to open visual studio with the .sln-file in that directory.

Linux/MacOS

tmux-sessionizer in action below. I have it bound to , such that I have the same shortcut regardless of development environment I’m in.

What makes tmux-sessionizer so nice, is that if you open your editor of choice (neovim) and a couple of other windows in that session, even if you navigate to another project, when you navigate back you’re right back where you started.

Other tools

Git worktree

I’ve been using git worktrees for many years, which helps out immensely when you want to have multiple checkouts of the same repository. I have to jump between feature-branches, fix-branches and master multiple times a day to fix something, see why something isn’t working and to keep the projects I work on going by implementing new featues. Git worktrees makes this nice, instead of juggling git checkout <branchname> and git stash, I clone all my repositories as a bare repository git clone --bare <repo-url> <repo-name>. In that bare repository I can then add multiple worktrees by running the command git worktree add <branch-name>.

In the example below I have a bare clone of my project twitch-recorder, where I have added the worktree master that, obviously, tracks the master branch, but I have also added the worktree feat-some-feature that is a feature branch. So now I have two worktrees, linked against master, no need to have multiple clones of the repository and each of these can have their own working state.

Because I’m used to the branch naming standard (feature/fix/bug)/name-of-branch, this doesn’t play well with the basic git worktree add <branch-name> command, because you can then only have one feature-branch at once. Hence I usually name my worktrees (feat/fix/bug)-name-of-branch but also tell that the worktree should track the remote branch (feature/fix/bug)/name-of-branch. This is possible to do by executing the following command, git worktree add feat-name-of-branch -b feature/name-of-branch, to create a feature branch.

Since I usually do this quite often, I wrote a tool called new-worktree to help me out.

New-worktree

I have the tool aliased to nwt because I’m lazy. This is the initial prompt, where you can choose if you want to add a feature, fix or bug branch. Select using the arrow keys and press enter to select.

Write the name of the branch and press enter to continue.

A new worktree has been added, in this case the feat-some-new-feature that automatically tracks the remote branch feature/some-new-feature.