Martin Ström
my-domain.se

AppleScript to open iTerm tabs for Rails development

Update: This script is ported (and improved) to work with OSX Leopards’ Terminal.app.

I never really liked iTerm because of slow redrawing, ugly text anti aliasing and not reflowing text when resizing the window.

After reading some interviews on a Rails site today and saw that a lot of people are using iTerm i wanted to give one more try (because I’d really like a tabbed terminal).

It has improved a lot the latest months and seems really usable now. To make Rails development easier, I hacked together a small AppleScript what will ask you for the path to the Rails directory you want to use and then open four new tabs with Server/Mongrel, Console, Autotest and the directory itself. I thought it could be useful for others as well so here you go:

Save as an .app and run from Quicksilver:


global rails_dir

tell application "iTerm"
    activate
    set rails_dir to the text returned of (display dialog ¬
        "Please Enter the Path to Your Rails Directory" default answer ¬
        "~/Projects/" as text)

    if (count of terminal) = 0 then make new terminal

    my open_tab("Server", "&& ./script/server")
    my open_tab("Console", "&& ./script/console")
    my open_tab("Autotest", "&& autotest")
    my open_tab("Rails Directory", "")
end tell

on open_tab(title, command)
    tell application "iTerm" to tell first terminal
        launch session "Default"
        tell last session
            write text "cd " & rails_dir & command
            set name to title
        end tell
    end tell
end run_command