Summary

A simple “productivity booster” tool to quickly run a set of actions.

What? Why?

I’m often switching between projects which can greatly differ.

It can be:

• Game development
• System or tool development
• Web development
• Music making
• Drawing
• Reading
• Learning
• Gaming
• …other things?

And each time the context switching is not easy, and I would like to have something to keep me focused when I work on these things.

So here’s an example.

Suppose I’m currently developing a Godot game, called “My Game”.
When developing this project, I need:

• A VS Code instance opened in the right folder
• A Godot instance opened in the right folder
• A web browser opened to the official Godot Documentation
• Some kind of music (like https://musicforprogramming.net)

Using qx, you can define “environments”, containing a set of actions.

Here’s a sample for the tasks I described above, as a qx configuration file:

variables:
  my_project_directory: "C:\godot\my-game"

environments:
  my-game:
    actions:
      # Open Godot in the project folder
      - type: run
        target: "C:\godot\godot.exe"
        working_directory: '${my_project_directory}'

      # Open VS Code in the project folder
      - type: vscode
        target: '${my_project_directory}'

      # Open Godot documentation
      - type: open_url
        target: 'https://docs.godotengine.org'

      # Open some music
      - type: open_url
        target: 'https://musicforprogramming.net'

Now, I can type qx my-game. I can also type qx m, because I only have one environment in my list that matches m.
And that’s it.

What ? You are on Windows and you don’t want to use the terminal ?
Type Win+R, then qx m in the “Execute” window.

And if you want, you can also use a terminal user interface by typing qx -i.