I’ve since seen Posting, an API client, which also looks amazing. The Charm tools are pretty jaw dropping to me, which include stuff like a Markdown app and email sender. Turns out, there are actually a ton of “TUI” apps, collected here by Justin Garrison. An SQL client, a file manager, and an image viewer, are a few that caught my eye.

I just found out about Lazygit, and am finding it a fascinating in-between of command-line Git and GUI Git. A TUI, if you will, a Terminal User Interface, which I’m just now understanding is a thing. Some people totally love it, and I’m giving it a bit of a whirl for fun.

Oh, and speaking of TUIs, if you were interesting in building one, the tools available at charm.sh are pretty mind-blowing.

I think it’s tremendously useful to automate this, and fortunately VS Code makes it easy. Say our whole goal is literally to run npm run dev when a particular projects root folder is opened. To do this: create a file called tasks.json in the root project folder’s .vscode folder, then add this:

{
  "version": "2.0.0",
  "tasks": [
    {
      "type": "npm",
      "script": "dev",
      "runOptions": {
        "runOn": "folderOpen"
      }
    }
  ]
}

It should look something like this within your project:

(It’s the same folder that holds the settings.json file you can use for per-project settings. I use that for stuff like what files/folders to ignore in the sidebar and search.)

Now next time you open that project folder, it’ll run that script:

You may get a permissions popup to approve if it’s your first time.

You can also manually approve or disapprove this functionality. From the Command Palette search for “Manage Automatic Tasks” and you’ll get this.

You can also search for “task” in the Command Palette and the tasks that you’ve defined will appear as commands you can run on-demand.

This is all well-documented in the VS Code documentation. Note that the full command “npm run dev” doesn’t appear in that tasks.json file. That’s because npm is a special “auto detected” task type in VS Code, which is also true for Gulp, Grunt, and Jake. You aren’t limited to those though, you can any shell or process command. Also note that tasks is an array, so you can set up and run multiple commands.

Me, I just like keeping it simple and running a single command. But if this appeals to you, check out those docs as there is lots of configurable power here. My experience beyond this in local development that needs to run a lot of commands to get going is centered around tmux, so check that out if you find yourself in a situation where you are needing run, say, more than 4 commands to kick off a dev enviornment.