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Tobias Lütke avatar

try

Terminal tool for creating and finding dated experiment folders

  • Developer tools
  • Productivity
View on GitHub

What it is

A single-file Ruby script that keeps throwaway coding experiments in one directory, prefixing each new folder with the date and letting you jump back to any of them through a fuzzy-search terminal picker ranked by recent use. It can also clone a Git repository or GitHub pull request into a dated folder, or create a detached Git worktree for the current repo. Developers who spin up lots of small test projects use it to stop scattering them across /tmp and the desktop.

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Facts

Stars
4,047 GitHub stars.
4,047

Forks
162
Commits
175
Contributors
26
Language
Shell
License
MIT
Last commit
Aug 13, 2026
On GitHub since
August 2025
First release
March 2026
Platforms
macOS, Linux, CLI
Self-hostable
No
Author
Tobias Lütke
Tags
  • file-manager
  • dev-environment
  • git

Last synced from GitHub on Oct 20, 2026

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What people are saying

Updated Oct 21, 2026
  • Bluesky“Tired of your "Sandbox" folder becoming a black hole? tobi/try sets up fresh directories for every experiment and helps you find them later:”Nov 13, 2025 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“try is a one-file Ruby script for dated experiment dirs and fuzzy jump. The real idea is retrieval. Creating test2 is cheap. Finding the Redis pool prototype…”Oct 1, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“New repo: Took and guided Claude Code to recreate it in React Ink (the framework Claude Code uses for terminal rendering.) Added a couple of features like the…”Dec 13, 2025 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“The `try` utility from Tobi is pretty neat ( But it could just be a fish function that doesn't require an init script etc. So I made it (or Claude did)”Dec 1, 2025 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“I found the `try` ( project a couple of weeks ago and really liked it, but wanted to try and implement it in Bash instead of Ruby. I finally finished and gave…”Oct 27, 2025 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)