tmuxp

This is a bit late, but in the book The Tao of tmux, I delve into how I use Makefile's to create cross-platform file watchers that can trigger unit tests. https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read#file-watching I use Makefile's regularly on open source and personal profiles (e.g. https://github.com/tony/tmuxp/blob/master/Makefile). Feel free to take and use that code, it's available under the BSD license. The creativity comes in when dealing with cross-platform compatibility: Not all file listing commands are implemented the same. ls(1) doesn't work the same across all shell systems, and find on BSD accepts different arguments than GNU's find. So to collect a list of files to watch, we use POSIX find and store it in a Make variable. Then, there's a need to get a cross platform file watcher. This is tricky since file events work differently

I designed tmuxp (https://tmuxp.git-pull.com) to pretty much deliver the CLI version of a workspace using tmux (https://tmux.github.io/). Works cross platform (Linux, BSD, macOS). And it's been doing the trick for years. Prior to building the tmux workspace, it even can call a bootstrap script (https://github.com/tony/tmuxp/blob/master/bootstrap_env.py) to check for and install dependencies. When a tmuxp session file (https://github.com/tony/tmuxp/blob/master/.tmuxp.yaml) is loaded, it automatically can source the user into virtualenvs, launch file watchers, and so on. Saves so much time. Since most software projects involve the same flow (installing packages locally for the project, launching a test runner.) Other things that help keeping it cross platform are using Makefile and commands conforming to POSIX (https://github.com/tony/tmuxp

The declarative nature of having a YAML/JSON config that consistently abstracts out the commands you'd make. It prevents the mistakes and repetition scripting tmux entails. In addition, there's no need to worry about shell scripting portability across systems. I personally use macOS, Linux and BSDs, so I have to take extra time to ensure my scripts work on machines without Bash. For some shortcuts, tips, and tricks on tmux, I have a section in a book I've recently published at https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read#scripting-tmux. It's freely available online. It covers command aliases, pattern matching, targets and formats. > Side note: tmux has an annoying misfeature that panes can't be named nor does their numbering stay stable. It's a bit tricky to programmatically set up a bunch of panes (can't do `tmux split-window -t mysession:my

entr is is what I eventually settled on after years of searching the perfect utility to build/run tests after file changes. After using gulp, grunt, watching_testrunner (which I eventually inherited maintainership of), watchman, watchdog (https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog), sniffer (https://github.com/jeffh/sniffer) entr is cross-platform on OS X, linux and BSD. watching_testrunner has no BSD support watchman is way too big and not domain specific enough to my needs sniffer worked quite well but it required having a scent.py file everywhere entr keeps it all in a neat, unix like package you can pipe files to. I keep some example usage in my book, The Tao of tmux at https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read#leanpub-auto-file-w.... In this section I demonstrate my workflow with entr(1) in a Makefile. The code I use in the example shou