Bind project to local directory, open from website

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Proposal

Gitlab is one of the few git suites that offers a directory structure. As such, when working locally, I effectively mirror my slugs to match gitlab. I imagine that a fair amount of users do this, too, just because it keeps things pretty easy to compare.

Because of this, what will happen sometimes is that I will actually navigate to gitlab instead of my local directories when attempting to open a project.

I'm fully aware that technically that's just me creating confusion for myself, but I think a really nice feature would be to simply allow a user to "bind" a group/project to a local directory, and then simply open a particular application right there.

For example, I often traverse my gitlab group as a directory. It would be really slick if there was simply a little icon button I could push which would allow me to open that project in my local directory via my default editor, VS Code in this case.

A little app

Due to how browsers works for local links, you would likely not be able to directly open a local folder directly for security reasons. A simple way around this would likely be a tiny application which the user would need to download, which they can then configure bindings for projects, and which application(s) to use for each one, likely with a default application and specific projects/groups getting a different application.

So the flow would likely be something like:

1. User clicks "open locally" icon button on a project or group.
2. Application is launched, similar to how you can have links that open Zoom and whatnot.
3. If folder exists, application associated with that directory is opened at that local directory, a la code /users/<user>/gitlab/<project>.
   • If folder does not exist, user is prompted to bind an existing folder, or download the repo via a copy-pastable git command.