Scratchpads

Scratchpads are Git-Tools version of dumping all of your "unsorted" work onto your desktop because you can't be bothered to figure out a better place to put them. Well, almost the same, except that it keeps the chaos neatly organized by week so you can impress co-workers with your mad organization skills. Don't worry, we won't tell them if you don't.

Directory Structure

The naming scheme used to generate scratchpads is YEAR-WEEK, so you'll end up with directories like 2021w10 for the 10th week of 2021. This works well when it comes to maintaining context for your current week, with the idea that you probably don't care too much about things left in your scratchpads from 6 months ago. Of course, if you decide you want to promote something to a proper project, you can always use gt new to give it its own repository.

  • scratch
    • 2020w48
    • 2021w10
    • 2021w11

scratch v1.2.8+

The gt scratch command opens a weekly scratchpad for you to work in. It's a great place for you to toss things you're hacking on, notes you're taking or just to have somewhere relatively organized to play around with a new toy.

It works very similarly to the gt open command, it just doesn't use git. That means you can still launch any of your configured applications just as you would if you were dealing with a repository. Have fun 😄.

Aliases

  • gt scratch
  • gt s

Example

# Open the current week's scratchpad in your default app
gt s

# Open a specific week's scratchpad in your default app
gt s 2021w10

# Open the current week's scratchpad in VS Code
gt s code

# Open a specially named scratchpad folder
gt s 2021w10-super-important

Tips

You don't need to use our naming scheme if you don't want to, just run gt s something and we'll create a something folder for you with no complaints. This can be useful if you have an important project which you don't want to lose track of.

temp v3.6.0+

The gt temp command is a shortcut for opening a temporary scratchpad which is automatically deleted when you close the launched application. This is useful when you want to quickly test something without leaving a mess behind.

Tips

The gt temp command creates a temporary folder in your current user's temporary directory and launches the specified application in that folder. When the application exits, the folder will be automatically deleted.

Example

# Open a temporary scratchpad in your default app
gt t

# Open a temporary scratchpad in PowerShell
gt temp pwsh

# Open a temporary scratchpad and don't delete it when you're done
gt temp --keep

Warning

Applications which exit immediately after launching (like VSCode's code command) will cause the temporary folder to be deleted immediately after the application is launched. You can prevent this by using the --keep flag to prevent the folder from being deleted - however you will need to manually clean it up when you're done (in this case it works much the same as a standard scratchpad).