Show HN: A small utility (repo manager, shortcuts, etc.) I made for devs (macOS) (jontelang.com)

2 points by wingerlang 3y ago ↗ HN

Hello, DevControls (a temporary-but-permanent name) is a little tool meant to help one manage multiple repositories by providing quick actions, status, links, etc, in an always-present menu bar.

The main website is in the post link, but I added a couple more screenshot i a twitter thread for anyone wanting to see more https://twitter.com/jontelang/status/1640731572159619073.

Now that the what is out of the way, I can expand on the why. I'm a developer for a long time, and I normally work across multiple repos at my day job. My breaking point came when I worked on a modular application with 20+ repositories, a feature would often span multiple repos, and getting a good overview was difficult. Not to mention navigating across apps, terminal paths, and generally getting everything to work together.

Naturally, I wrote scripts to manage the complexity. And eventually I built a little menu bar application to do those things. DevControls is my attempt to bring the core features I use daily into a nice little package.

I've been using this myself for some months at this point, it's stable and I have all core functionality in the app. So I figured I should send it out to the world and see if it sticks. My next planned features that I miss from my prototypes are: seeing a list of open PRs, checking out branches, stash + checkout master + pull from origin (all in one go), pulling all repos in one go, and honestly a few more things

Happy to receive any feedback!

2 comments

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talksik 3y ago ↗

Kinda cool, like that you went with status bar util instead of another full blown app.

wingerlang 3y ago ↗

Thanks, and yes. I've been a heavy user of https://github.com/matryer/xbar for years. A tool which lets you build menus and actions from bash scripting. Super helpful but they tend to be a bit more static and often breaks with unexpected outputs.