Hackery

Catalyst + Screen

Fri 05 Sep 2008

I'm an old-school developer, doing all my hacking using terms, the command line, and vim, not a heavyweight IDE. Hacking perl Catalyst projects (and I imagine other MVC-type frameworks) can be slightly more challenging in this kind of environment because of the widely-branching directory structure. A single conceptual change can easily touch controller classes, model classes, view templates, and static javascript or css files, for instance.

I've found GNU screen to work really well in this environment. I use per-project screen sessions set up specifically for Catalyst - for my 'usercss' project, for instance, I have a ~/.screenrc-usercss config that looks like this:

source $HOME/.screenrc
setenv PROJDIR ~/work/usercss
setenv PROJ UserCSS
screen -t home
stuff "cd ~^Mclear^M"
screen -t top
stuff "cd $PROJDIR^Mclear^M"
screen -t lib
stuff "cd $PROJDIR/lib/$PROJ^Mclear^M"
screen -t controller
stuff "cd $PROJDIR/lib/Controller^Mclear^M"
screen -t schema
stuff "cd $PROJDIR/lib/$PROJ/Schema/Result^Mclear^M"
screen -t htdocs
stuff "cd $PROJDIR/root/htdocs^Mclear^M"
screen -t static
stuff "cd $PROJDIR/root/static^Mclear^M"
screen -t sql
stuff "cd $PROJDIR^Mclear^M"
select 0

(the ^M sequences there are actual Ctrl-M newline characters).

So a:

screen -c ~/.screenrc-usercss

will give me a set of eight labelled screen windows: home, top, lib, controller, schema, htdocs, static, and sql. I usually run a couple of these in separate terms, like this:

To make this completely brainless, I also have the following bash function defined in my ~/.bashrc file:

sc ()
{
  SC_SESSION=$(screen -ls | egrep -e "\.$1.*Detached" | \
    awk '{ print $1 }' | head -1);
  if [ -n "$SC_SESSION" ]; then
    xtitle $1;
    screen -R $SC_SESSION;
  elif [ -f ~/.screenrc-$1 ]; then
    xtitle $1;
    screen -S $1 -c ~/.screenrc-$1
  else
    echo "Unknown session type '$1'!"
  fi
}

which lets me just do sc usercss, which reattaches to the first detached 'usercss' screen session, if one is available, or starts up a new one.

Fast, flexible, lightweight. Choose any 3.