HACKER Q&A
📣 straydusk

Do you have a good solution for isolated workspaces per project?


I often work on 2-3 projects at once. They each have some combination of: - terminal windows - browser for testing - browser for research, brainstorming, etc - documents & finder windows - various tools (expo, etc)

I have a lot of trouble keeping these separate. I use MacOS - you can have many desktops, but they're all in the same workspace. I think what I was is something like tmux for my whole computer, where I can switch away from a project and come back and be where I left off, with only the content from that project.

I actually tried to build this myself as the OS level, but Mac seems to lock everything down pretty hard.

Anybody have a good solution?

  👤 johncoltrane Accepted Answer ✓
You can try what Apple calls "fast user switching", which is actually pretty fast. The last (and only) time I used it, my days were split half-and-half between two projects for two clients, each with its own infrastructure. I did that primarily to help me focus but it had one pretty cool perk that I've been missing ever since: isolated accounts meant that I never had to worry about which Git/$SAAS/whatever user was currently authenticated and managing keys and such was a breeze as there was no "managing" needed, really.

I could do it because I had _some_ level of control on my work machine. Now that I work for a much larger organisation… I can't even imagine how hard it would be to have such a setup.

I don't know how usable it is in practice if you are switching contexts every 10 minutes, though.