Show HN: Rockhopper – Launch windows apps from bash on Windows 10

28 points

10 years ago

I made a thing this afternoon. If you are using windows 10 and would like to open windows apps from the ubuntu bash shell normally you can't do that. I wrote this app to (sorta) let you do that. It's a two part app, first is a dotnet core webapi C# app that runs on your windows box. Next is a shell script that you put in your path on the ubuntu shell.

It's called Rockhopper (named after a species of penguin, since you are hopping form Linux to windows with this app is just seemed like the right name :) ), and you invoke it like this:

rockhopper -c code -a C:\\\\Users\\\\shawn\\\\Documents\\\\file_to_edit.txt

That opens Visual Studio Code from windows with that file passed in. Couple of caveats, the windows app has to be launchable via the windows cmd prompt, currently only supports 1 argument to open and the pathing is touchy, and lastly this has absolutely 0 security built in. I plan of fixing all of that but would welcome anyone else's contributions. Speaking of that it's all open source and MIT licensed here:

https://github.com/jaegerpicker/Rockhopper

Have fun and use github to report issues if you have them. Currently I don't have a binary build up yet but I do have TFS doing CI so every push to master kicks off a build, I'll publish them if more than just I use it at some point. It's early but very much working.

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