jamesob/desk

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2576 stars · 113 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Desk is a lightweight shell-based workspace manager that lets you switch between project contexts with a single command, loading directories, virtualenvs, aliases, and environment variables from simple Deskfile shell scripts. It has no dependencies beyond bash and works with bash, zsh, and fish.

Use cases

• switch between project workspaces in the shell
• load project-specific environment variables and aliases with one command
• activate a virtualenv when entering a project directory
• keep AWS credentials out of shell history when working on cloud projects
• namespace shell functions and aliases per project
• run a command inside a project's environment without activating it

When to choose

• you juggle multiple code trees and want fast, documented context switches
• you want a dependency-free, pure-shell tool that works across bash, zsh, and fish
• you prefer plain shell scripts over heavyweight project or environment managers

When to avoid

• you need a full development environment or dependency manager like direnv, tmuxinator, or nix-shell
• your workflow requires per-directory automatic activation rather than explicit desk switching
• you need a tool under active development with frequent updates

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

cli developer-tools configuration-management workflow-automation developer-tools cli cross-platform shell zsh fish workspace-manager deskfile context-switching environment-variables shell-aliases command-line automation linux macos bash

Member repositories

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