ahd-logo

Ad-Hoc Dispatcher

Create ad-hoc macros to be dispatched within their own namespace.

If you are confused about terminology used then take a look at the glossary section of the docs.

What does ahd do?

ahd allows you to take annoying to remember commands and organize them into easy to re-use macros.

Features & Roadmap

Path Expansion

  • Macros can take full advantage of wildcards + regex to pattern match directories. For example if you wanted to delete all PDFs in all folders on the desktop you can use sudo ahd register no-pdfs "rm *.pdf" "~/Desktop/*".
  • nix and windows path adages are cross-platform. For example ~ is converted to %USERPROFILE% on windows, \ paths are converted to / on nix systems and vice-versa.

Cross platform

  • ahd natively supports windows and any *nix systems (including Mac OS).
  • Supports copy-paste cross platform configurations (assuming the same commands and file structure are on both) For example if you want to write a command that git pulls in a folder called /development on your desktop using the *nix standard ~/Desktop/development/* works on both *nix and windows.

Dynamic Execution & Organization

  • One YAML file contains the configuration for all your macros instead of being all over the place.
  • Macros can be updated manually (editing the YAML file), or simply re-registered.
  • The defined Paths and commands can be overwritten on each use (see overriding for details).

Roadmap

A full roadmap for each project version can be found here: https://github.com/Descent098/ahd/projects

Example use cases

Really the possibilities are only limited to what you can type in your regular terminal, but here are some good examples:

  • Update every git repo in a directory
  • Organize your downloads folder by various filetypes
  • Multi-stage project compilation/build in various directories

Why should I use ahd?

The easiest way to understand why this project is useful is with an example. Let's say you want to write a simple script to take all the PDF's in a directory and put them in a .7z archive and then remove them. Well all you need is this simple command 7za a -t7z PDFs.7z *.pdf && rm *.pdf...

Yeah, pretty awful to remember. Assuming we want to do this every so often let's make a script we can call. Currently with bash you need to drop the script in usr/bin (and try to remember what you called it), or add it to your bash/fish/zsh aliases (assuming you use the alias file, or .bashrc etc. if you don't), and on windows it's just not even worth it.

Enter ahd, you can register a macro (lets call it zip-pdfs) using the same annoying command, in this case sudo ahd register zip-pdfs "7za a -t7z PDFs.7z *.pdf && rm *.pdf" ".". Now when we want to re-use this macro in the directory we're in you just type ahd zip-pdfs.

If you forget the name there's a list command, and if you use a longer name there's bash autocomplete (fish and zsh support coming later).

Who is ahd for?

The primary audience is developers looking to speed up annoying workflows. However there are a number of other people it could benefit, such as:

  • devops specialists; can use ahd to create a common set of macros across servers .
  • dual booters; people who want one common config for multiple OS's.
  • testers; if you need to execute multiple tests on various systems you can write one macro to run them all.
  • etc; people who are sick of having a bunch of random scripts everywhere and want one config file for complex commands.