run-behind

Run one command interactively in the foreground, while other commands run in the background.

Use cases:

• Running linting and typechecking while writing commit messages, instead of after or before like with git hooks
• Probably others, but commits is the reason I wrote this for

Installation

yarn add run-behind --dev
# or
npm install run-behind --save-dev

Usage

yarn run-behind <foreground-command> <background-command-1> <background-command-2> ... <background-command-n>

Example: shared with your team in package.json

// ...
  scripts: {
    "lint": "eslint src --ext .js,.ts --cache",
    "typecheck": "tsc --noEmit --incremental",
    "commit": "run-behind git-cz 'yarn lint' 'yarn typecheck'"
  }
// ...

Example: just for you

Install globally:

npm install -g run-behind

Add an alias to ~/.zshrc or equivalent for easy usage

alias gc=run-behind git-cz 'yarn lint --quiet' 'yarn typecheck --pretty'

Tips

If you want to get back to your terminal without waiting for the tasks to end, just hit ctrl-c.

Things will be commmited even if the background command fail. It's not a bug, it's a feature. You can use git commit --amend if it turns out something failed.

Setting up caching for the commands will make the experience a lot better:

• eslint: just add --cache to the command
• tsc: use --incremental
• jest: usually caching is set up by default, you can add --onlyChanged to only run relevant tests