Obsessing over multiple projects

In my new job, I’ve switched each project being a unique combination of git repositories¹ to all projects being in just a few repositories.

For instance, my primary codebase consists of two repositories, one for the frontend and one for the backend. As time progresses, I work on multiple (mostly) independent projects in each repo, each one on its own branch. Each project requires a different constellation of files, sometimes organized in radically different ways in my Vim tabs.

So, to cope with this, I obsess about it.

I’ve long had Tim Pope’s awesome Obsession plugin installed, but had only rarely used it. Now, each time I start a new project, I begin with a fresh Vim (well, Neovim) instance and start loading up the files I need, organizing them as I see fit with splits and tabs. I often get to the point where I’m humming along after loading 5 to 15 files. At this point, I run :Obsess Session-something.vim, where the ‘something’ is a memorable tag for what I’m working on. That saves (and continues to save) my session so that I can :qa at any point in time and my set up can be easily restored with a vim -S Session-something.vim.

What this allows me to do is switch between projects in an instant. If I have one branch that is close to being merged, I can let the PR simmer while I load up the session from another branch and keep on working. Also, when it comes time to commit, I like to quite out and start a brand new Vim session, so that I can use Fugitive to browse, stage, and write my commit.

One side effect of this workflow is that I end up with several Session-*.vim files in the root of my repository. So then, how do I pick which one to load up without scanning and copy/pasting? I turn to one of my other favorites, fzf:

vi -S `find . -name 'Session*' | xargs ls -t | fzf`

This presents a list of sessions, in reverse chronological order. I can just hit enter for the most recent one, or navigate and filter to the one I want, which is usually not far away.

I continue to iterate on how to best manage my work environment, and I have a few ideas on how to improve it (e.g. worktrees), but for now, this is quite usable.