Announcing godo

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:51:27 +0000

A while ago I wrote about a script I'd written that I called gp which addressed a frustration I had about, essentially, starting work. What gp did was eliminate all the drudgery involved with opening iTerm tabs (yes I still use it in preference to Terminal.app despite it's occasionally freezing up for a few seconds under Leopard), changing directory to my project folder, and running lots of different commands for editors, browsers, version control, and so on.

The gp script had many deficiencies, some of which were addressed by Solomon White who made his own version that worked with Terminal.app. But neither script was ideal and we agreed that, at some point, it would make sense to pool our efforts.

Pressure of work meant I didn't look any further at it until last weekend when I found myself compelled to build a new version of gp which I have called godo which stands for:

go (to project) do (stuffs)

I started out using hoe to make the new script a gem and addressed all the issues that had made gp unwieldy like it's use of a pre-build folder index (that was never up to date), the clumsy configuration, and the lack of separation from iTerm.

This was also a good opportunity for me to test out GitHub. From the beginning I made godo [available as a GitHub project0(http://github.com/mmower/godo/tree/master). I was surprised and delighted when [Lee Marlow forked](http://github.com/lmarlow/godo/tree) godo and pushed up a bunch of changes including Terminal.app support, depth pruning, and per-project configuration.

It meant I had to figure out how to add Lee's repository as a remote with a local tracking branch:

git remote add lmarlow git://github.com/lmarlow/godo.git
get fetch lmarlow
git branch --track lmaster lmarlow/master

take a look at the changes he'd made:

git log -p master..lmarlow/master

then merge them into my own branch for release:

git merge lmaster
git push origin master

I might have preferred to cherry pick his changes and integrate them separately but it felt like a bridge too far, for me, in Git terms. I was just pleased finally to have his changes integrated.

godo is, i think, more or less ready for serious use. If you want it:

sudo gem install godo

to get the latest version (1.0.5) which supports both iTerm and Terminal. If you like it please leave a comment or something. And if you find bugs or missing features, you are welcome to fork the project and push some changes!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on godo

Announcing godo