This is actually kind of a funny story. I was in the market for a new keyboard, and saw that some NuPhy keyboards have a knob on them. I ended up buying a Keychron (K5 Max) instead, but the idea of having a knob to increment and decrement values in my code — like some unholy cross between a mad scientist and a DJ — stuck. The rabbit hole led me to an M5 knob that I almost bought more times than I can remember, but in the end, didn’t.
But this story isn’t about a knob. Rather, what happens immediately thereafter: I would still need a way to get my changes to show up within my Flutter app. Fortunately, I already had a first layer with flutter-run, and building the rest of the orchestration was fairly straightforward, if a bit laborious. Pressing a single button now triggers Flutter’s hot refresh, and my changes are instantly live. Is it the slightest bit superfluous? Maybe. But it absolutely streamlines my process of pixel perfection.
Then came the idea to be able to have an instantly viable worktree: a branch-specific clone of a given Flutter project, complete with .env files and all the necessary bells and whistles to get it running like its ‘main’ counterpart. This fit perfectly within the scope of Thunderous, and is now accessible with a ‘-w’ flag.