How to expedite workflows by launching browser tabs from bash scripts.
The problem
A part of my daily workflow is participating in forums. Every morning I read through Hacker News, 8base Community, several different subreddits, StackOverflow, and a few others for an hour. It’s how I like to engage with developers.
There is something merely tedious about this morning routine. Remembering each community forum to visit is a slog. I end up always leaving a dozen or more tabs open in Chrome browser; my computer battery’s lifespan reduces to that of a gnat.
For a hot-second, I became all excited about finding some tab manager. Once that second cooled, I decided that the last thing I wanted was another app/extension in my life. So, I asked myself…
“What’s the most simple solution to track and open my forums every morning?”
The solution
After some brain-storming — a light rain, at best — I decided that I’d try to employ a Bash script. 2-minutes later, everything worked; seriously, it was that simple. Here’s what I did.
Start by opening your terminal and running the following commands — or using equivalents.
# Move to the Desktop directory
cd ~/Desktop
# Create a new bash script
touch launcher.sh
# Open the script in a text editor
code launcher.sh
With the bash script open, copy and paste the following code into the file.
#!/bin/bash
# Keep a list of links.
links=(
“https://community.8base.com/"
“https://www.reddit.com/r/graphql/"
“https://news.ycombinator.com/"
“https://github.com/8base"
)
# Open links in the list.
for i in “${links[@]}”
do
open “$i”
done
wait;
I’d be hard-pressed to find a more expressive script. However, lets quickly talk through what’s happening.
The links variable stores an array of URLs. The for loop iterates over each URL in links and passes it as an argument to the open command to launch a new tab in your default browser.
Save the script and hop back into your terminal. The launcher.sh file needs execution permissions. We can grant that using the following chmod command.
chmod +x launcher.sh
Sweet! That’s it. Double-click the launcher.sh file from your Desktop and all your tabs will appear.
The Decoration
There is one glaring issue that must be mitigated. This script looks UhhhGLY on our home screen! Let’s improve that.
I found this newspaper emoji icon on Google Images. Simply right-click it in the browser and select “Copy Image.” Now, right-click the launcher.sh file and open the “Get Info” pane. In the top-left, select the file icon so that it highlights and press [CMD] + V to paste it.
Rename the file to whatever you’d like; it’s fine to remove the .sh file extension.
The End
The file should look like a native desktop app at this point! Double-click it, and all specified URLs will open in your default browser. If you need to update the URLs, simply do so in a text editor. What I’ve begun to do is duplicate these scripts for different workflows (i.e. Forums Launcher, News Launcher, Debugging Launcher).
Originally published by Sebastian Scholl, Product Manager at https://www.8base.com.