Trying VS Code’s Terminal Loader instead of foreman or overmind

I did a video about debugging Rails in Visual Studio Code a couple years ago that showed off how to use the remote interface of the debug gem with Rails 7's Procfile-based bin/dev workflow. Using foreman or overmind and the remote debugger interface is fine but it's honestly no replacement for the developer experience of running binding.irb directly against a dedicated terminal running nothing other than rails server.

So I decided to give this Terminal Loader extension a try to see if I could have my cake and eat it too: a one-shot way to run all of my development servers across multiple terminals. The verdict? It works!

1. Install the extension
2. Run the command TLoader: Load Terminals (via Command-Shift-P) once, which will:
   • Launch a couple dummy terminals with split-views, which you can feel free to kill manually
   • Create a workspaceConfiguration/LoadTerminal.json, which you can (and should, IMO) add to .gitignore
3. Edit the LoadTerminal.json file to specify which terminal groups you want to open, how many columns per group, and the commands to run for each one

This is my config for a straightforward Rails 7 app that runs the Rails server, the tailwind CLI, a Rails console, and Solid Queue. Because I don't typically need to interact with tailwind or my queue daemon, I relegated those to a shared terminal group. And while I didn't have need for it in this case, I appreciate that the extension allows you to set a different working directory for each terminal, which will be a huge boon to my projects that embed sub-libraries and example apps.

Here's my first crack at a LoadTerminal.json for this project:

{
  "version": "1.2.1",
  "groups": [
    {
      "name": "Rails Server",
      "description": "Rails Server",
      "enabled": true,
      "terminals": [
        {
          "name": "server",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "env RUBY_DEBUG_OPEN=true bin/rails server -p 3000"
          ],
          "num": 0
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Rails Console",
      "description": "Rails Console",
      "enabled": true,
      "terminals": [
        {
          "name": "console",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "bin/rails console"
          ],
          "num": 0
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Other",
      "description": "Tailwind / Queue",
      "enabled": true,
      "terminals": [
        {
          "name": "tailwind",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "bin/rails tailwindcss:watch"
          ],
          "num": 0
        },
        {
          "name": "queue",
          "path": ".",
          "cmd": [
            "bin/rake solid_queue:start"
          ],
          "num": 0
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Seems to work fine! Nice change of pace not having to juggle virtual-terminals-within-an-electron-wrapper-within-a-terminal anymore.