When I started rebuilding this site I also took some time to clean up (and properly establish) all my dev stuff — organizing old projects, establishing backup/deploy processes, and reworking my local dev environment.
Along the way I discovered The Perfect Web Development Environment from Chris Mallinson and replicated it on my machine. There were pretty much zero pain points and it didn’t take very long to get everything up and running. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a clean local setup.
The real kicker with Chris’s configuration is that he also adds a local home page (@ http://home.dev) so you can quickly access all of your projects in a nice visual list. I forked his GitHub repo 
and made a handful of changes to better match my projects.
All said and done it looks like this:
Everything functions as a link (in some cases as a shortcut to /wp-admin/)…the only caveat is that anything requiring an additional server command to start obviously won’t work without it (e.g. rails apps).
Still, super helpful and a fun little mini project to house all your stuff 
.