Messing with my .bash_profile this afternoon, post-diving into Laravel and Git (which I’ve been doing much of the last week), I realised I could boot my entire dev environment with 5 letters. Fewer, if I wanted.

So instead of going to the Dock, clicking each of the icons, going to each and faffing around, I could at least boot them all, and set off some commands in Terminal (or ITerm2 as I’m now using).

Weirdly, until Justine gave me an evening of command-line Git learning, and wanted my .bash_profile, “Like so,” I hadn’t realised you could do stuff like that, despite amusing myself with all manner of shell scripts. Now I know what’s possible, I’m over-achieving in efficient laziness.

What’s missing is:

• Opening multiple windows in ITerm or Terminal and running a different command in each (I don’t want to boot multiple instances of an app).
• Setting off a menu action in an opened app, e.g. in Transmit going to my work drive.
• Extending it to boot the environment and then a specific project, e.g. “devup laravel” would open my laravel installation in each of the apps, like opening the database in Sequel Pro; cd-ing to the laravel folder after automatic SSH-ing into my Vagrant box, and so on.

Some of these are probably uncomplicated, but this was a 30-minute experiment that turned out to be very useful.