Here's a short and fun little ditty I'm going to throw up here so I can find it later... (because why would I try to memorize something so simple when I can put it here and share with you all?).

My Builds Are Speaking to Me

Running this command from my Mac command line window gives a nice audio feedback when builds are complete.

(gulp && say 'super!') || say "what the what?" -v Albert

Some Context

While doing some project work on my Mac lately I'm in the situation where I am constantly running gulp at the command line. This workflow could apply to any CLI build tool like gulp, rake, make, etc and ya I know I need to spend the time getting gulp watch to work but let's not worry about that for now...

The build is not slow, but it's not fast (taking about 6) seconds. That's just enough time for me to see a squirrel and by the time I realize the build is done, I've forgotten if I actually recently kicked off the build or if the most recent run is out of date from the latest code I've worked on...

So I searched for a quick way to get some auditory feedback when my build was done so I could more efficiently continue the development flow...

I first stumbled upon this gist which has a NodeJS implementation console.log("\007");, but this produces the same beep I get when my unit tests fail - which I don't want when everything's good to go.

Then I found someone mention the mac say command which is WAY better for my needs and I settled on the following little command.

(gulp && say 'super!') || say "what the what?" -v Albert

Whats cool about this pattern is I can replace gulp with any other build tool on other projects like rake, grunt, make, etc...

I'd like to introduce a simple little tool/(set of scripts) I threw together last weekend called CommandAllThings.

Some background

Do you use any command line build tools like GulpJS, GruntJS, Rake, etc?

I leverage these tools in many projects, both at work and on my own projects. I recently noticed that the muscle memory I've developed was slowing me down as I switch between projects and inadvertently use the wrong tool in the wrong project.

When working on one project all day and typing rake test throughout the day, then switching to another project not using rake I found myself still typing rake test even though I needed to type gulp test, or grunt build. This really messes with my flow. All I wanted to do was test or build the current project.

So I created CommandAllThings.

What is it?

In short, it's a very simple abstraction on top of your usual task runners like GulpJS, GruntJS, rake, etc that allows you to accidentally type the wrong tool and still accomplish the desired task with the right tool.

By using aliases in either PowerShell or Bash we can route, rake, gulp, grunt, etc to CommandAllThings which will inspect the current directory, determine the correct tool and execute your task(s) with the correct tool.

This is great. Now when I type in the wrong command rake test in a gulp project, I don't get slapped in the face with an error saying "cannot find a rakefile." Instead I continue on my way like I knew what I was doing.

Does it only work on Windows or on the Mac?

At the moment it works on both.

• For Windows I have an implementation in Powershell.
• For the Mac you can alias to a Bash script.

Download at GitHub!

Check it out!

What's next?

I'd like to look at adding other tools to the list. You can check out the project for other task runners I know about. And if you have any thoughts on how to detect the other types, drop me a note in the issues (or consider sending over a pull request).

I'd also love to get some feedback on how to best or more easily get this into peoples's development environment. For now it's pretty manual and since it's all about your profile, a bit personal, so probably a good thing that it's not automatically installed.

Happy Commanding!