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enwiro

Activating environments

Enwiro switches you between self-contained units of work - a feature branch, a pull request, a vault, an experiment - each with its own folder and context. You activate one by name and your tools (terminal, editor, browser, agents) follow it together.

An environment is such a unit of work that already exists. A recipe is a blueprint enwiro can turn into an environment on demand.

You do not need to worry if an environment exists already - recipes and environments are addressed the same way, and if you attempt to use a recipe, enwiro just converts it into an environment on the fly.

Activating

Section titled “Activating”
Terminal window
enw activate <NAME>

activate switches to the matching unit of work, creating it first if it doesn’t exist yet.

To run a single command inside an environment instead of switching to it, use enw wrap (it sets one up on demand too):

Terminal window
enw wrap <COMMAND> [-- [COMMAND_ARGS]...]

Listing what you can activate

Section titled “Listing what you can activate”
Terminal window
enw ls

enw ls shows everything you can activate: existing environments and the recipes you could still cook. (Both enw ls and enw activate need the daemon running.)

Names that aren’t listed

Section titled “Names that aren’t listed”

Some names work without appearing in enw ls: myrepo@some-new-branch creates that branch in a fresh worktree, and myrepo#123 opens any issue or PR by number, assigned to you or not. A notification tells you what is being created - watch it, since a typo’d name creates a branch with exactly that name.

Different ways to work on the same thing

Section titled “Different ways to work on the same thing”

Several cookbooks can describe the same underlying unit of work or context differently, for example the same git branch:

  • the GitHub cookbook offers repo#42 (a pull request), and
  • the git cookbook offers repo@pr-42 (the branch that pull request created).

Both lead to the same git worktree. While it hasn’t been set up yet, you may see more than one way to reach it and can pick whichever you like. Once it exists as an environment, enwiro recognises the equivalent recipes and stops listing them, so you simply activate the one thing, regardless of which cookbook’s name you (or enwiro) used to create it.