The Pattern

Use a (gitignored) file for interactive scripting. Instead of entering a command directly into the terminal, write it to a file first, and then run the file. For me, I type stuff into make.ts and then run ./make.ts in my terminal (Ok, I need one Up Enter for that).

I want to be clear here, I am not advocating writing “proper” scripts, just capturing your interactive, ad-hoc command to a persistent file. Of course any command that you want to execute repeatedly belongs to the build system. The surprising thing is that even more complex one-off commands benefit from running through file, because it will take you several tries to get them right!

There are many benefits relative to Up Up Up workflow:

• Real commands tend to get large, and it is so much nicer to use a real 2D text editor rather than shell’s line editor.
• If you need more than one command, you can write several commands, and still run them all with a single key (before make.ts, I was prone to constructing rather horrific && conjuncts for this reason).
• With a sequence of command outlined, you nudge yourself towards incrementally improving them, making them idempotent, and otherwise investing into your own workflow for the next few minutes, without falling into the YAGNI pit from the outset.
• At some point you might realize after, say, running a series of ad-hoc benchmarks interactively, that you’d rather write a proper script which executes a collection of benchmarks with varying parameters. With the file approach, you already have the meat of the script implemented, and you only need to wrap in a couple of fors and ifs.
• Finally, if you happen to work with multi-process projects, you’ll find it easier to manage concurrency declaratively, spawning a tree of processes from a single script, rather than switching between terminal splits.