I got tired of searching my shell history, so I built QuickRun.

Andrej Schwanke — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:14:04 +0000

We all do it.

Typing the same commands every day, continuously asking Google or a colleague on Slack for the 100th time how that one specific command was to start the project. Or spending time digging through READMEs, scrolling through shell history, or doing the classic "keep pressing the up arrow until you hit the command you ran 3 months ago... just to realize it wasn't even the right one."

Personally I ran into this problem daily. Working on a large Django project comes with a bunch of custom management commands that nobody really knows by heart. You basically spend more time searching for the name of the command than actually running it.

The problem

I got fed up wasting time searching for specific commands.

There's this general assumption that terminal commands are something external to a project: reusable, generic, always the same. But that's not true for large projects with custom shell scripts, custom Django commands, specific formatter flags, or environment-specific scripts that only make sense in that one codebase.

Sure, docker compose up is something you reuse everywhere. But in a large project that's often a small fraction of the commands you actually need. The rest are deeply project-specific and constantly forgotten.

So my question became: "How can I solve this?"

QuickRun

QuickRun is a VS Code extension that lets you save terminal commands and run them with a single click from a sidebar panel.

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You can organize commands into groups and scope them either to a specific project or globally across all your workspaces.

You can also trigger any command directly from the VS Code command palette:

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Share with your Team

When you save a command with project scope, QuickRun creates a .vscode/quickrun.json file in your repository. Commit that file and suddenly every teammate has the exact same commands available the moment they clone the repo.

Adding a command takes about 10 seconds:

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Auto-Setup: Let the LLM figure it out for you

If you're joining an existing project and don't know where to start click the Auto-Setup button in the sidebar toolbar. QuickRun will use GitHub Copilot to analyse your workspace and automatically suggest runnable commands.

You get a preview list to confirm before anything is added and nothing changes without your approval.

Global scope

Commands like docker ps or SSH into your server don't belong to any specific project. You can save them globally, and they follow you across every workspace.

Try it out

📦 VS Code Marketplace: Install QuickRun
🦊 Open VSX: Available here
⭐ GitHub: Give it a star!

If you think this could benefit your workflow, give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments. Feature requests and feedback are very welcome!

DEV Community: Andrej Schwanke

I got tired of searching my shell history, so I built QuickRun.

The problem

QuickRun

Share with your Team

Auto-Setup: Let the LLM figure it out for you

Global scope

Try it out