Start Your Day with Spotlight

Everyday I come into work, I do the same thing:

• I open three tabs in Chrome: PivotalTracker, Gmail, and Github
• I open five tabs in iTerm: one for mongoDB, one for zeus, one for my server, one for a rails console, and one for git
• I open my editor to the root of my rails app

It’s routine, so I wanted to automate it. To do so, I wrote a pretty simple shell script:

#!/bin/bash

# open tabs in Chrome
open -a Google\ Chrome http://www.gmail.com
open -a Google\ Chrome https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/workspace
open -a Google\ Chrome https://github.com/darbysmart/rails

# open iTerm2 from default terminal
open -a iTerm

# method to open tabs in iTerm and execute some command
launch () {
/usr/bin/osascript <<-EOF
tell application "iTerm"
    make new terminal
    tell the current terminal
        activate current session
        launch session "Default Session"
        tell the last session
            write text "{$1}"
        end tell
    end tell
end tell
EOF
}

# open tabs and execute code in each tab
launch "vg;cd rails;mongod"
launch "vg;cd rails;zeus start"
launch "vg;cd rails;zeus s"
launch "vg;cd rails;zeus c"
launch "vg;cd rails;subl ."

The only problem was that in order to run this script I’d have to open my terminal and run the script from there. That’s not cool.

To solve this, I saved the file with a .command suffix and made the file executable:

$ chmod a+x good_morning.command

Note the above makes the file executable for all users/groups.

And now I use Spotlight on my Mac to find it and execute it! So, when I sit down in the morning, I can just type cmd+Space to open Spotlight, type good morning, hit enter, and my workstation is automatically set up for me!

Hacky, but awesome.