There are many obvious benefits to working your computer from the terminal. I’ve been experimenting with opening tabs and running chains of commands from the terminal. Here’s a command to do exactly this.

newtab() {
    osascript -e 'tell application "iTerm" to activate' -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTerm2" to keystroke "t" using command down'
}

Using ‘&’ allows us to chain commands. From this process you can only imagine what possibilities are out there. I have been annoyed that whenever you start a server or a watch builder, the process requires you to open a new tab, so I wanted to add this to my bash functions to automatically open a new tab for me. If you haven’t gotten your jekyll server to work yet, it’s likely due to this error , so be sure to fix it first.

I have been trying to chain functions in bash, for practical purposes such starting my blog’s server, the jekyll build & watch function, opening the site in the brower and opening the file to edit it. If you try to use these commands, be sure to change blog to what your folder is called.

The main trick is that you have to call the newtab early in the process, the tab will not let you call any commands after a process that is continuous such as the jekyll server or the build watch function. I’m excited to use these for webpack and other continuous processes in my site building processes.

blgv () {
  cd ~/Documents/blog
  open 'http://localhost:4000'
}

blgw () {
  cd ~/Documents/blog
  sublime .
}

blgpl () {
  cd ~/Documents/blog
  git pull origin master
}

blgpu () {
  cd ~/Documents/blog
  git push origin master
}

blgsrv() {
  newtab
  cd ~/Documents/blog
  jekyll server
}

blog () {
  newtab
  blgpl &
  blgv &
  blgw &
  (jekyll build --watch)
}

alias blg="blog"

To start my jekyll blog and everything else I need to get blogging, I type in blgsrv, followed by blg and all the tools I need are ready.

notes: sublime is the shortcut word added by a CLI to open sublime text. Most of the other commands are written as short cuts on my terminal but have been written out for clarity.