Try CLI: Ephemeral Workspaces for Clean Developer Experiments

Ephemeral Workspace Management

• 💡 try is an ephemeral workspace manager created by Shopify CEO Tobias Luki.
• 🎯 It solves the problem of directory clutter by automating the creation and navigation of experiment folders.
• 🚀 Designed for developers to manage quick ideas and coding sessions without manual organization.

Core Features

• 🔍 Features a smart fuzzy search with a scoring algorithm to rank projects.
• 📅 Includes autodating for folder names, prefixing experiments with the current date for chronological sorting.
• 🔗 Offers instant Git integration, allowing direct cloning of repositories into temporary environments.
• ✨ Transforms messy experimentation into a structured, searchable, and time-ordered system.

Technical Foundation

• 🛠️ Built primarily with Ruby and shell scripts, aiming for a zero-config, single-file solution.
• 💻 Shell scripts handle deep system integration and alias wrappers, making up about 60% of the repository.
• 💎 Ruby provides the Terminal User Interface (TUI) and logic, ensuring portability and expressiveness.
• 📂 The minimal repository structure facilitates easy code auditing and modification.

Community & Impact

• 📈 Shows high project momentum with nearly 100 commits and a recent surge in activity.
• ⭐ Has garnered over 2600 stars, indicating its high value within the developer community.
• 🤝 Features a collaborative nature with contributions from multiple developers and AI, ensuring reliability.
• ✅ It's a battle-tested tool used by high-profile engineers, addressing edge cases in various shell environments.

Practical Applications

• ⌨️ Developers use it by typing try followed by an idea name to create or navigate to an experiment.
• 🧪 Ideal for testing new libraries, spiking out bug fixes, or temporarily cloning GitHub repositories.
• 🧹 Keeps the main workspace clean by indexing experiments in a separate path, making them accessible when needed.
• 🧠 Significantly reduces the cognitive overhead associated with managing numerous project folders.