I would like to open many of my programs through the mac terminal, since I use that frequently. For example, I want to be able to launch "chrome" from the Mac OSx terminal by typing open chrome.
Of course, this would only work if the environmental variable path knows where to find the executable file for this program. I've tried searching for the executable file for applications (such as chrome) using this:
find . -iname "*chrome*"
but none of the results work ( and there were a lot of results, of course). So, I'm wondering what is the best way to either
1) find the executable to add to the PATH environmental variable
or
2) launch an application via some other method
Thanks.
Generally as far as I've seen, you can launch practically any application like so:
# binary file:
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome
# open .app:
open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/
# binary + variable:
appName="Google Chrome"
"/Applications/$appName.app/Contents/MacOS/$appName"
# open + variable:
appName="Google Chrome"
open "/Applications/$appName.app/"
Hope this helps! :)
Related
Is there a way to make NeoVim as default text/code editor (without any bad side effects) ?Trust me, I looked to lots of StackOverflow question/answers and tried a few things but nothing worked for me.
Note: I'm on macOS Big Sur (version 11.2.1). What I want is when I click on files to open in NeoVim.
--> For example, in ~/.zshrc (and added to ~/.bash_profile also just in case) I have:
Note: zsh is my default shell
alias nvim=$HOME/nvim-osx64/bin/nvim
export EDITOR="nvim"
export VISUAL="nvim"
When I do set in Terminal it shows:
EDITOR=nvim
VISUAL=nvim
And yes, I quit and started the terminal (I'm using iTerm2). I even reboot.
--> I will place my $PATH here just in case it has anything to do it that. When I do echo $PATH it shows:
--> And, just in case someone suggests:
I can't Select a File > Open With... and select NeoVim as default text editor, since that option doesn't show and I can't do Choose Other since I can't select NeoVim in that way.
If anyone needs more information, please say and I will edit the question with that info. Thanks!
Setting variables in the terminal will not affect the GUI file associations. To do that you have to change the OS's file associations.
Though it appears to be a small project and unsupported, I've had a good experience using duti. It's a wrapper around the Apple file extension API. The configuration did take me a minute to figure out. I'll post it if I can find it.
After a while I found the answer to my own question, here it is how you can set NeoVim in Mac as the default text editor. Now, you will be able click on files and opening them in NeoVim:
Some people recommended me to have a look at the follow links:
https://gist.github.com/Huluk/5117702
https://superuser.com/questions/139352/mac-os-x-how-to-open-vim-in-terminal-when-double-click-on-a-file
That didn't work for me but it served as a reference to look up related topics (automator + neovim).
After a while, I discover this blog:
https://blog.schembri.me/post/neovim-everywhere-on-macos/
Go and have a look at the blog, but here it is how you do it:
Launch Automator (Finder -> Applications -> Automator)
New Document -> Choose a type for your document: Application
In Actions search for Run AppleScript and drag that to where it says something like "Drag actions here..."
Delete the default example of AppleScript
Copy and Paste the code in the blog (where it says NeoVim.app) to where it previous had the default code
Save the new Automator app (save as aplicattion format). Save it in the Applications folder
Right-Click a file type you wish to open every time you click on them (e.g. .php file). Select Get Info or do cmd + i, it will open informations about that file. Scroll to wher it says Open With and select Other. Then just go to Aplicattions folder and select your new NeoVim "app".
Do the same to other file types if you wish.
You can now double click on your PHP files (or others if you did the same) and open them in NeoVim. Enjoy!
Note: You really need to do Right-Click, Get Info and look for Open With to change in all files with that extension. If you skip Get Info and just Right-Click + Open With, it will only work for that specific file...
This is the code from the blog:
on run {input, parameters}
set cmd to "nvim"
if input is not {} then
set filePath to POSIX path of input
set cmd to "nvim \"" & filePath & "\""
end if
tell application "iTerm"
create window with default profile
tell the current window
tell the current session to write text cmd
end tell
end tell
end run
This would open a new window even if you already had one open.
I change it so that it would open in a tab:
on run {input, parameters}
set cmd to "nvim"
if input is not {} then
set filePath to POSIX path of input
set cmd to "nvim \"" & filePath & "\""
end if
tell application "iTerm"
tell the current window
create tab with default profile
tell the current session to write text cmd
end tell
end tell
end run
Note: I'm using iTerm2. If you are using another Terminal Emulator, change where it says iTerm to the name of your terminal...
For anyone using Kitty on MacOS, I found a pretty simple way to accomplish this using the remote control feature.
First you need the following set in your kitty.conf:
allow_remote_control yes
listen_on unix:/tmp/mykitty
Using Automator like in #DGF's answer, I created an Application with the "Run Shell Script" action, and this is the script:
if [ -z "$(pgrep kitty)" ]
then
open /Applications/kitty.app
sleep 3 # allow ample time to startup and start listening
fi
/usr/local/bin/kitty # --to=unix:/tmp/mykitty-$(pgrep kitty) launch --type=os-window nvim "$#"
Save that as an application somewhere, and select it from "Open with"!
Note: to be honest, the logic to handle starting up kitty if it's not already running is a little flaky. But it seems to work great when kitty is already running, which of course it is most of the time for me. Also, it doesn't work at all if kitty is running but has no windows. :\
Choose nvim as the default application by means of a txt file sub-menu like here with Preview for PDFs:
My Windows-using colleague gave me a url that looks like this:
\\server\share\folder
I'm able to access it on my Mac, via Finder by translating it to:
smb://server/share/folder
Would like to write a little bash script to prepend the smb: and flip the wacky backslashes to forward slashes.
My question is: how to open Finder via shell script? and can I feed Finder a url?
To open the Finder via a shell script on a Mac simply do:
open DIR
... where DIR is the directory you want to open. The Mac OS will open Finder, since that is the correct application for directories. e.g.
open .
... will open the current directory in a Finder window. You should be able to open an smb:// path with that too. The Mac OS should recognize the smb:// prefix and open the appropriate program. If you pass it an http:// path, it'll open using the default web browser.
I was able to accomplish this by making the following shell script which is called via Automator via a keyboard shortcut when the desired Windows path is selected:
OUTPUT=$(echo "$1" | sed 's/\\/\//g')
A="${OUTPUT#*Production}"
foo="smb://path/to/network/directory${A}"
open "$foo"
Here's what it looks like in Automator:
I am using a cygwin shell in windows 10. I am trying to figure out how to open chrome from the command line. I have tried typing chrome, google-chrome, chromium-browser, start chrome, open chrome, and many variations. I have even tried using my python shell, and I have also tried going to the folder where chrome.exe is located and opening it from there. The main reason I want to figure it out is because I plan to write HTML documents with python and then open them in chrome. Any ideas?
Did you try ./chrome.exe while being in the directory where the file is located? The path ./ is probably needed before the file name since the executable is not in a standard system path. You can of course also specify the full path to the file as well.
Use
cygstart "C:\path\to\chrome.exe"
or to open a specific URL,
cygstart "http://my/url.htm"
To make my Real Studio application portable, I want to make it open an executable file on Mac, Windows, and Linux with the default Console/Terminal application. I have a string s, which is the filename of the executable file. I have this so far:
#If TargetMacOS
DIM sh As new Shell
sh.Execute "open " + GetFolderItem(s).ShellPath + " -a Terminal"
#EndIf
But how can this be done on Windows and Linux? For Linux, could I open the file with gnome-terminal or konsole, and if so how could I figure out which one to open it with?
For linux you could actually use the shell to test and see which one is available using the "which" command. If both are then just pick one (or maybe make it user configurable)
On windows I'm not sure exactly how you'd force it to open in the command prompt.
The best way to do this is to setup preferences in your app to allow the user to set the folderitem of their console app. There is no other way to really know what software they will be using. There are too many options available to each platform and no way to set the default in the OS.
If your looking for a way to find the default shell, it is available through the ENV variable.
For example- type $SHELL in your console and it will return the path to the default shell.
I want to launch an app on OSX from a script. I need to pass some command line arguments. Unfortunately, open doesn't accept command line args.
The only option I can think of is to use nohup myApp > /dev/null & to launch my app so it can exist independently of the script that launches it.
Any better suggestions?
As was mentioned in the question here, the open command in 10.6 now has an args flag, so you can call:
open -n ./AppName.app --args -AppCommandLineArg
In OS X 10.6, the open command was enhanced to allow passing of arguments to the application:
open ./AppName.app --args -AppCommandLineArg
But for older versions of Mac OS X, and because app bundles aren't designed to be passed command line arguments, the conventional mechanism is to use Apple Events for files like here for Cocoa apps or here for Carbon apps. You could also probably do something kludgey by passing parameters in using environment variables.
An application bundle (.app file) is actually a directory. Instead of using open and the .app filename, you can move into the app's directory and start the actual machine code program located inside. For instance:
$ cd /Applications/LittleSnapper.app/
$ ls
Contents
$ cd Contents/MacOS/
$ ./LittleSnapper
That is the actual binary executable that might accept arguments (or not, in LittleSnapper's case).
In case your app needs to work on files (what you would normally expect to pass as: ./myApp *.jpg), you would do it like this:
open *.jpg -a myApp
You can launch apps using open:
open -a APP_YOU_WANT
This should open the application that you want.
open also has an -a flag, that you can use to open up an app from within the Applications folder by it's name (or by bundle identifier with -b flag). You can combine this with the --args option to achieve the result you want:
open -a APP_NAME --args ARGS
To open up a video in VLC player that should scale with a factor 2x and loop you would for example exectute:
open -a VLC --args -L --fullscreen
Note that I could not get the output of the commands to the terminal. (although I didn't try anything to resolve that)
I would recommend the technique that MathieuK offers. In my case, I needed to try it with Chromium:
> Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium --enable-remote-fonts
I realize this doesn't solve the OP's problem, but hopefully it saves someone else's time. :)
Lots of complex answers when you can simply access Applications folder and type:
open -a [APP NAME]
This is it!
I wanted to have two separate instances of Chrome running, each using its own profile. I wanted to be able to start them from Spotlight, as is my habit for starting Mac apps. In other words, I needed two regular Mac applications, regChrome for normal browsing and altChrome to use the special profile, to be easily started by keying ⌘-space to bring up Spotlight, then 'reg' or 'alt', then Enter.
I suppose the brute-force way to accomplish the above goal would be to make two copies of the Google Chrome application bundle under the respective names. But that's ugly and complicates updating.
What I ended up with was two AppleScript applications containing two commands each. Here is the one for altChrome:
do shell script "cd /Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app/Contents/Resources/; rm app.icns; ln /Users/garbuck/local/chromeLaunchers/Chrome-swirl.icns app.icns"
do shell script "/Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\\ Chrome --user-data-dir=/Users/garbuck/altChrome >/dev/null 2>&1 &"
The second line starts Chrome with the alternate profile (the --user-data-dir parameter).
The first line is an unsuccessful attempt to give the two applications distinct icons. Initially, it appears to work fine. However, sooner or later, Chrome rereads its icon file and gets the one corresponding to whichever of the two apps was started last, resulting in two running applications with the same icon. But I haven't bothered to try to fix it — I keep the two browsers on separate desktops, and navigating between them hasn't been a problem.
Beginning with OS X Yosemite, we can now use AppleScript and Automator to automate complex tasks. JavaScript for automation can now be used as the scripting language.
This page gives a good example example script that can be written at the command line using bash and osascript interactive mode. It opens a Safari tab and navigates to example.com.
http://developer.telerik.com/featured/javascript-os-x-automation-example/
osascript -l JavaScript -i
Safari = Application("Safari");
window = Safari.windows[0];
window.name();
tab = Safari.Tab({url:"http://www.example.com"});
window.tabs.push(tab);
window.currentTab = tab;
Simple, here replace the "APP" by name of the app you want to launch.
export APP_HOME=/Applications/APP.app/Contents/MacOS
export PATH=$PATH:$APP_HOME
Thanks me later.
With applescript:
tell application "Firefox" to activate
Why not just set add path to to the bin of the app. For MacVim, I did the following.
export PATH=/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/bin:$PATH
An alias, is another option I tried.
alias mvim='/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/bin/mvim'
alias gvim=mvim
With the export PATH I can call all of the commands in the app. Arguments passed well for my test with MacVim. Whereas the alias, I had to alias each command in the bin.
mvim README.txt
gvim Anotherfile.txt
Enjoy the power of alias and PATH. However, you do need to monitor changes when the OS is upgraded.
To Create a New Text File OR open an existing one, in any folder, using a Text/Code Editor like the Free TextMate app on MACOSX, use this command on Terminal:
open -n /Applications/TextMate.app --args "$PWD/some file.txt"
Instead of a Text File, you can use any file type, based on your app's requirements and its support for this syntax.
This command also simulates the New Text Document Here Command on Windows and has been tested on MacBook Pro 2021 and Monterey 12.2.1 successfully.