You can use sips together with iconutil to generate a complete .icns file for your app from a single 1024 by 1024 PNG without any third party software:
Incidentally, does anyone know enough about the way sips scales PNGs to confirm that it makes sense to create the 16px version straight from 1024px, as opposed to basing it off 32px (and all the way up)? I.e., is it better to downscale in fewer steps (as currently) or in smaller steps?
Note of caution: if qlmanage uses QuickLook SVG rendering, YMMV. I recently had to deal with SVGs that render broken in Finder but correctly in, say, Affinity or Adobe tools.
Rasterization feels sufficiently finicky that I personally would consider it part of designer’s workflow rather than automated conversion pipeline; but then some would say the same about raster versions at different sizes, so in the end it depends on what you can and want spend resources at.
If it does work for you, though, you could generate every size from SVG directly and skip sips altogether (but you should check both methods to see which gives you a better quality icon, at small sizes single pixels can matter and so it would depend on how qlmanage handles rasterization to different sizes).
If you really want nice looking smaller icons (16x16, 32x32) you'll have to hand edit them after scaling down to get something that looks crisp.
That said I just checked some macOS system icons (get info on app, select icon, copy, create new document in Preview.app) and they don't seem to be hand adjusted any more.
I’d say hand-crafting pixel-perfect icons with different versions for extreme sizes is worthwhile (and I don’t believe in simple rasterization from vector for the same reason), but not every developer would have resources to spare for that.
I was lucky enough to oversee a project replacing seven hundred icons back in 2017, and we hand-adjusted the low resolution versions of 16x16 and 24x24.
> “…notice that the icons are not simply the same image scaled up or down. TTrackBar is a good example of this: at each size, the small indicator marks are different. An icon designed for 16×16 or 32×32 won’t resize and scale to look good at 24×24, because the pixel grid is different. Even if we support antialiasing, a 1-pixel-wide line looks much cleaner when it takes up one pixel in the image, rather than being approximated through antialiasing over several pixels, which makes it look blurry. Similarly, shape edges should be snapped to the pixel grid for each size. We’ve gone through and tweaked the icons for each different pixel grid.”
This meant that not only did we tweak the icons at the small sizes (in the example above for a track bar control, we don’t use the large size 128x one scaled down to 16x even though they are both built on a 16x grid) but that we used a different base grid for the 24x and 48x versions compared to all other sizes.
It took time. And not everyone has those resources. But if you can, it is the right thing to do.
Thanks for the insight. My script targets a solo dev such as myself, but crafting icons is always superior.
As a designer, the way I recommend to do it is not by tweaking icons but by having a specific process separating design from deliverables. Define branding language, come up with your symbols and marks and mascots and their use guidelines, and then prepare deliverables based on that. Icons intended to be used at extremely different sizes (16px vs. 512px) and in different contexts are different deliverables.
I find that the `pbpaste | something | pbcopy` idiom is common enough that it's worth having a shell function for it:
pbfilter() {
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
pbpaste | "$@" | pbcopy
else
pbpaste | pbcopy
fi
}
Then you can use something like `pbfilter json_pp` or `pbfilter base64 -d` or `pbfilter sed 's/this/that/'` or whatever.
This version also can also act as a plain-text-only filter. If you just use `pbfilter` with no argument, it'll remove any formatting from the text in the pasteboard, leaving just straight plain text.
It does have a some limitations, though: you can't use it with an alias, or pipeline, or anything complex like that. The filter command must be a single regular command (or function) and its arguments.
I love this flow! Such a powerful and clean way to solve text issues.
# This will remove Windows double-spaced empty lines from your copy/paste buffer
alias winlines="sed '/^$/{$!{N;s/\n//;};}'"
# pbw = [P]aste [B]uffer to fix [W]indows line endings
alias pbw="pbpaste | winlines | pbcopy"
Also - if you want `pbpaste` and `pbcopy` on Linux...
# imitate MacOS's paste buffer copy/paste:
alias pbcopy='xsel --clipboard --input'
alias pbpaste='xsel --clipboard --output'
I find it so annoying that these only work with plain text and RTF. On X11 there is `xclip`[0] and on Wayland there is `wl-clipboard`[1] both of which support binary file formats either through parsing the header or explicitly setting the MIME type.
This means you can do things like copy an image from the terminal and paste it into a graphical program like a browser or chat client and vice-versa. Also can be very useful in shell scripts for desktop automation.
The workaround on MacOS is to use AppleScript via `osascript` to `set the clipboard to...`.
It creeps me out when the clipboard is unexpectedly shared between my phone and computer. And since the feature seems to turn on randomly but not reliably when I want it to, I’d rather it just didn’t exist.
I have a clipboard manager application called "Paste" (creative i know). Its an awesome app for a million reasons. But one thing I like is that it allows me to see and hear when my iphone copy worked.
So I have it enabled so there is a sound when something goes into the clipboard. Even on my mac, I have come to rely on that audio feedback. But it has the added benefit that when I am using my phone in front of my computer and I copy something on my phone, I immediate (and it is impressively fast... maybe a 200ms delay), I hear the chime that something was added to my clipboard on my mac. So it gives you that good feedback that a copy "worked".
You can also shift+cmd+V to see the clipboard history, which is another complimentary tool with universal clipboard because if a paste isn't working as expected you can see if the universal copy never "took" (as you mentioned it is semi-unreliable), or if it just got overridden. You can then use the navigator to paste the older item.
I've noticed that more and more apps on both macOS and iOS sniff the clipboard contents and randomly clobber it. I usually notice it in apps like Sourcetree, where I'll click something or do a certain action and suddenly I can't paste anymore. I even get a feel for it, like my mind detects the pattern that empties the clipboard so I sense when I can no longer paste, but I can't figure out concrete repeatable steps to make it happen. On iOS it's more random, and I feel like it's probably Facebook doing it, or maybe websites in Safari. I just assume that everything is spying on my clipboard contents now, hoping to log secrets/passwords and PII to sell to scammers.
I have to say, this is one of the more disappointing developments from Apple, that they certainly must know by now about these clipboard shenanigans, but have done nothing to stop them. They need to implement permissions that deny all apps the ability to get/set the clipboard by default, and have an option to ask the user whether so-and-so app can access the clipboard (outside of normal copy/paste), every time with the option to allow always. And all clipboard access attempts should probably get logged somewhere.
I would think requiring opt-in for clipboard functionality would be the more radical option that would leave most users (myself included, I would imagine) scratching their heads when they can’t copy/paste as a matter of course. Maybe you meant something more specifically related to 3rd-party sniffing/modifying clipboard contents, but I haven’t really encountered that outside of apps such as CopyQ and Paste, and they are pretty explicit and intentional about their functions.
I have found a lot of utility with cross-device copy/paste. I know it requires the somewhat mysterious phantom Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connectivity that AirPlay/Airdrop use, so if I have disabled Bluetooth on my device, for example, it will no longer work. I could see where it might not be fully reliable enough to count on, I have experienced inexplicable failures, not often but enough to understand that it might not be some folks’ default preference. As part of the “handoff” function, it can be disabled in Settings at least.
Some of the “not working” cases may be due to the application you’re copying from setting the items as `localOnly`, ex: from a password manager. I don’t have an explanation for other failures.
I’m on the same version of 1password, probably for similar reasons.
In their iOS app, there’s an entry in Settings -> Security -> Allow Universal Clipboard which lets you opt-in to passwords through the clipboard. I suspect there’s something similar on macOS.
Yes, I use this app multiple times a day, each time with the added satisfaction of knowing I own the app and not a subscription. Even if my credit card expires I will still have access to my passwords.
There’s a fix for it where you remove all the unlock entries in Keychain, and then re-enable it. Only thing that worked for me long term (but it did fix it 100%)
I tried this yesterday. It... helped. But what I've now found is that if I escape out of the password prompt (which will turn the screen off again) and then try to unlock it a second time, the watch unlock will be triggered. I wonder if it's something about waking from sleep. (I also wonder if it would have worked before to do the same thing, but it never occurred to me to try.)
Requiring WiFi makes (so the phone/computer is on a network and can communicate with the other devices), but what's the benefit of Bluetooth? Does it only work when the phone and computer are near each other?
Bluetooth is used to discover peers and to initiate communication. Thus handoff works even on a wifi network that blocks broadcasts. It even works when no wifi network is present, by setting up an ad hoc network for the connection. (Disclaimer: This is all I know. The details seem rather murky, as handoff is a proprietary Apple protocol.)
This is great utility I didn't know about! Thanks!
But do you know why it doesn't seem to work with the `pbfilter` function?
If I do directly `pbpaste | vipe | pbcopy`, then it opens vim and the clipboard text is pasted there.
But if I run `pbfilter | vipe`, then vim opens with a blank buffer.
function pbfilter() {
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
pbpaste | "$@" | pbcopy
else
pbpaste | pbcopy
fi
}
It seems that the number of args is 0 for some reason
So much of my Linux use is over ssh from a MacOS client that I've made a `pbcopy` executable that just pipes stdin over ssh to my MacBook to its pbcopy (with a dedicated ssh key that runs this as a forced command). Makes it super nice to be on an SSH session and `pbcopy` some content to my MacOS clipboard!
I'm also super interested in this! I've had many amusing moments of instinctively typing either `pbcopy` or `pbpaste` on remote boxes followed by a brief moment of confusion when my local clipboard isn't updated :)
I have! Unfortunately not supported in MacOS Terminal.app, which I'm otherwise very satisfied with (have tried iTerm2, use Alacritty on Linux, just like Terminal.app).
I don't think wrapping my entire shell session in a moderately complex third party tool (that maybe just uses pbcopy under the hood[1]) counts as "simply" when compared to my existing solution which just pipes over ssh and a couple bash scripts.
This tool isn’t doing anything particularly complex.
It sets up a new pty, attaches the child process to it, listens for OSC52 control codes, and calls pbcopy when appropriate.
You can wrap your ssh session with it and you’re done.
It’s very elegant and multiple orders of magnitude less complex than something like tmux.
I should use `git format-patch` instead of creating a mock draft PR (which I end up deleting) and modifying the URL to add `.patch` and then downloading the patch file haha. `git format-patch` would probably be faster :)
Speaking for myself, the first form is more natural- even if it’s a useless cat, because I’m always cat-ing files to see their structure. Then progressively tacking on different transforms. And then finally putting it in whatever I want as output.
It’s so ingrained, I’m more likely than not to just write it out that way even when I know exactly what I’m doing from the onset.
generally, speaking, if you don't have an idea of how big the file is, or it would take up too much real-estate on your terminal window, sure. 100%. It was just an example.
lot's of times we sort of know what we are working with, but don't remember the particulars especially
I really recommend folks use "less" over cat, especially keyboard oriented folks. Different terminal emulators don't always have the scroll behavior I want, not do they always allow me to search the file I'm looking at. "less" does all those things, in nearly every environment no matter the terminal emulator, and has other wonderful options to boot (chop long lines so they don't wrap can be nice for logs, line numbers can be VITAL, etc).
I still uselessly use cat though, it's such a nice way to build a pipeline.
As a scientist who cares about reproducibility, the big difference between the "useless cat" and providing the input file name on the command line is that, in the latter case, the program can capture that file name and reproduce it. That is harder when using stdin.
Many of my programs and scripts start output with the line:
# cmd arg1 arg2 arg3 ...
and simply echo back lines that start with '#'. That way, I have an internal record of the program that was run and the data file that was read (as well as previous parts of the analysis chain).
And, 'R' ignores lines starting with '#', so the record is there, but does not affect later analyses.
The “useless cat” meme needs to die. Everyone is aware that most commands accept a file argument, but looking up the arguments and their ordering is annoying and using cat for things like this is just fine.
granted, it is a little snarky and maybe the snark isn't appropriate in today's tech environment. but no, things like "useless use of cat" do not need to go away, because they make me better at what I do in little ways. those little ways add up over time.
> but looking up the arguments and their ordering is annoying
you seem to be arguing for complacency. taking your idea to an extreme, why learn to do _anything_ well?
It usually doesn't matter much, but there are some situations where it can matter a lot. For one thing, you can't use seek() on a pipe, so e.g. `cat bigfile | tail` has to read through the entire file to find the end, but `tail bigfile` will read the file backward from the end, completely skipping the irrelevant beginning and middle. With `pv bigfile | whatever`, pv (which is basically a pipeline progress indicator) can tell how big file is and tell you how for through you are as a percentage; with `cat bigfile | pv | whatever`, it has no idea (unless you add a flag to tell it). Also, `cat bigfile | head` will end up killing cat with a SIGPIPE signal after head exits; if you're using something like "Unofficial bash strict mode" [1], this will cause your script to exit prematurely.
Another sometimes-important difference is that if there are multiple input files, `somecommand file1 file2 file3` can tell what data is coming from which file; with `cat file1 file2 file3 | somecommand` they're all mashed together, and the program has no idea what's coming from where.
In general, though, I think it's mostly a matter of people's expertise level in using the shell. If you're a beginner, it makes sense to learn one very general way to do things (`cat |`), and use it everywhere. But as you gain expertise, you learn other ways of doing it, and will choose the best method for each specific situation. While `cat |` is usually an ok method to read from a file, it's almost never the best method, so expert shell users will almost never use it.
If the command is meant to stream through something really fast by using a large buffer size, then prepending a cat(1) will limit the incoming buffer size to ~4k.
I teach shell scripting. Cat invocations are cheap and help learners understand and keep clear where input is coming from, and where it is going. There are no awards or benefits to reducing the number of lines, commands invoked, or finding the shortest possible way to perform a task in a script. There are plenty of detriments to reading and understanding though when we try to obfuscate this to save 1ms of execution time on a script that is going to execute near instantaneously anyways.
I 100% agree with you. My only defense of OP is that `<` is something tends to be forgotten. Like everyone else in this thread I go to `cat` first for things like this. But sometimes I forget that even `<` exists, and the callout is a nice reminder.
Not just that, but also all the bytes have to go through an extra pipe. Presumably they're copied an extra time because of this.
When you run "cmd < file", the command reads from stdin, which pulls directly from the file. When you do "cat file | cmd", "cat" opens the file, reads from there, and writes to a pipe. Then "cmd" reads from its stdin, which is a pipe.
GNU cat will use the copy_file_range syscall when possible!
copy_file_range allows a user land program to copy data between two files without doing any user space work. Instead of reading data into a buffer and writing it back out to the destination, the kernel will somehow manage to move the data for you.
I think this will prevent any extra copies from occurring in situations where it can be used.
To add, searching for “useless use of cat” will yield several results for those interested in learning more. Other examples include “useless use of echo” and “useless use of ls *”.
All of them do. Including bash. It’s just not the same syntax (ie ‘< filename’).
But I honestly think people who try to optimise away ‘cat’ are optimising the wrong thing. If one extra fork() is that detrimental then don’t use a shell scripting language.
For a lot of people, “useless” ‘cat’ enables them to write a pipeline in the order that their brain farts out the requirements for the pipeline. So they’ve optimised for human productivity. And given the human brain is slower than a few extra fork()s, I think optimising for one’s brain makes more sense here.
Literally the next sentence after the one you quoted explains my point:
> It’s just not the same syntax (ie ‘< filename’).
Reading from a file isn’t a hard problem. Having a good UX for doing that is where most shells fall apart. And that’s basically what ‘cat’ offers here: an improved UX.
Having ‘cat’ as a shell builtin wouldn’t really solve the complaints raised by “useless use of” anyway because you’d still be piping (and in some cases, fork()ing too). You couldnt really use ‘cat’ as syntactic sugar for ‘<‘ because things start to get really weird if you want to pass flags to ‘cat’ or even redirect the output to something other than a pipe. And given ‘cat’ is POSIX (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands#/media...) the current behaviour of shells is, in my opinion, correct. This is why my own shell has a differently named builtin that approximately serves the purpose of ‘cat’ but for instances when you need the command built into the shell and it can’t just be passing a file handle to the next command (in my case, because i wanted to pass metadata out-of-band as well as the file contents)
And sent it straight away to my coworker on Slack.
I then spent the rest of the day making a new private key and adding my new pubkey to all of the 1000+ servers I had root access to. I mean we had tools to help but it still wasn’t fun.
With great power/convenience comes the potential to do dumb things at lightning speeds!
also userify allows you to set up sudo access on some of the servers and not others, so that'd take care of the other root-access issue you have. (sudo also provides auditing/logging controls that are useful in a multi-user environment)
That's not a bad idea. I've never actually made the same mistake, but I have caught it at the last moment and having tab complete not pick the private one first would help.
It would have avoided it! I was using tab and forgot to select .pub as you correctly surmised. I was a junior dev at the time and all the seniors got a good laugh out of it, and I use it as a cautionary tale about trying to be TOO overeager and efficient.
On Linux I have these wrap xsel or xclip, and likewise open to xdg-open.
Now, for your Mac example — if that's a specific pipeline you often use, you can write a Service menu entry to do it in place, without switching to a terminal.
Since you mention both pbcopy and iTerm - I love https://github.com/skaji/remote-pbcopy-iterm2. I do most of the work on a remove Linux server, treating my MacBook as mostly a dumb terminal, and being able to transparently copy from the remove to my local clipboard is so nice.
I have tried it, but for whatever reason I just don't like it. I prefer just running tmux in iTerm with no integration.
On the topic, you can also integrate tmux with the native clipboard - I have set copy-pipe to the remote pbcopy, so any selection done in tmux get copied to my local clipboard. I also just found out that tmux also support it natively (https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Clipboard#the-set-clipboar...).
This is interesting, thank you. I've been automating various things with Hammerspoon but (I think) it's limited to what you can reach with either a11y or osascript / the NS dictionary for the app you want to manipulate, but Shortcuts seems to have some actions that aren't in the NS dictionary.
For instance, in Shortcuts, I see that there's a "Pin Notes" action for Notes.app, but I don't see anything for pinning notes when I open Notes.app with "File -> Open Dictionary..." in Script Editor.
(In this case it's likely that Notes.app has the a11y bits necessary to run that action from Hammerspoon, but it would probably be easier to go through Shortcuts.)
Yes. I use it a great deal, but I haven't gotten used to using the linux equivalents. I guess that would be either xsel or xclip. Maybe I should create a "pbcopy" that runs one of those. I like to minimize the cognitive load when I switch between mac and linux command line environments.
Oh man. I recently threw together a "j2p" script to make converting between json and python dicts simpler, and combining it with pbcopy/pbpaste will make it so much better:
$ python -m json.tool --help
usage: python -m json.tool [-h] [--sort-keys] [--no-ensure-ascii] [--json-lines] [--indent INDENT | --tab | --no-indent | --compact] [infile] [outfile]
A simple command line interface for json module to validate and pretty-print JSON objects.
positional arguments:
infile a JSON file to be validated or pretty-printed
outfile write the output of infile to outfile
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--sort-keys sort the output of dictionaries alphabetically by key
--no-ensure-ascii disable escaping of non-ASCII characters
--json-lines parse input using the JSON Lines format. Use with --no-indent or --compact to produce valid JSON Lines output.
--indent INDENT separate items with newlines and use this number of spaces for indentation
--tab separate items with newlines and use tabs for indentation
--no-indent separate items with spaces rather than newlines
--compact suppress all whitespace separation (most compact)
And I have one that unifies _both_ to `clip` so you can put the same command in both sides of the pipe, e. g. to turn a line-delimited blob on your clipboard to a space-separated one:
I've aliased that (and its equivalents on Linux and Android/Termux) to 'xc' and 'xp' (for X11 Copy and X11 Paste, as I'd originated this on Linux).
Being able to populate or read from the system clipboard (or secondary clipboard!), or to feed it, including by reading from or writing to pipes is wonderful.
alias pbg='pbpaste | fgrep --color -i "`pbpaste -pboard find`"'
select all in a terminal window with pages of log data and cmd-c copy; find the one phrase you want to find in that data and cmd-e to put it in the find pasteboard; cmd-n new window, type pbg to isolate the log lines.
I recognize that your pbg alias works for pretty much any text you could copy, but I wanted to mention, in case you're looking at log files with plain old less, there's the & limiter, which limits the current view to only lines matching a regular expression (or, if you type ^R during a & prompt, for a text match).
If you type ^N or ! during a & prompt it will limit the view to those lines that do not match the expression.
These view limits stack, so you can "&WARN<enter>" to see all lines that have WARN in them, and then maybe you want to see just a certain PID so "&12345<enter>" and you'll only see lines with both WARN and 12345, but then that one module is printing out a bunch of messages you think are safe to ignore so you do "&!modulename<enter>" and it filters out log lines that match modulename. Very handy and less is everywhere.
I don't remember when I learned about these, but they've been game changers, and everyone I've shared them with feels the same way. I use your use case often as well, though through `jq` because I'm more familiar with it, and sometimes wish to do transforms.
You can use `python -m json.tool` for just JSON formatting, which is convenient now that Python is available by default in most Linux distros. Jq is really excellent though.
I have an alias that while trivally simple is quicker to type and remember. It copies whatever file you give it to the clipboard which is super handy. I use it with the "Compare with Clipboard" to diff a file in Rubymine for example.
Could be an alias, I have a limited set of aliases for each type of system. But I keep a repository of hundreds of personal shell scripts and it fit better there.
Not a command-line tool but the network link conditioner is also really great. Never seen such a tool on another OS
You can simulate a really bad network. Latency, bandwidth, packet loss etc. Great for testing but also if people insist on cameras being on. Just screw up the connection so bad that everyone gets annoyed with your blocky image and robot voice and suggest you turn off video and then you make it 'magically' ok - lol
Toxiproxy is such a tool for everywhere else, and it did help me test and improve networking code for poor conditions: timeouts, retries, packet loss, etc.
Never had heard of this before. Some other cool tools in the "additional tools for X-Code" package which I had also never heard of. https://developer.apple.com/download/all/
I've used AU Lab to pipe my microphone input through my headphones, which is apparently how professionals like to record audio (a "monitor" so you can hear how you sound), but I couldn't get used to it
How was the latency when you last tried it? Most outboard audio interfaces (even inexpensive ones like the Focusrite Scarletts with ≤ 2 inputs) have a "direct monitor" feature that is as close to zero-latency as you can reasonably get.
Note that NLC is a GUI interface to control dummynet and PF (packet filter). It sets up rules to inject packet relay and drop a certain percentage of packets based on the profile.
You can use dnctl and pfctl on macOS to do similar things and more.
You can do that with standard Linux tooling available on every distribution, see https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html. What you're specifically looking for is `qdisc netem`, it can inject packet loss, reordered packets, duplicate packets, delay and more.
Needs to mention afplay for playing audio! You can easily use this to make a command-line MP3 player.
Others have mentioned the “say” utility for speech synthesis. There is a lot you can do with it, it supports the TUNE format, which allows you to "shape the overall melody and timing of an utterance... for example ... to make an utterance sound as if it is spoken with emotion".
Unfortunately, the TUNE format turned out to be a bit of an evolutionary dead end; the last generation of Speech Synthesis that supports it is the Alex voice which shipped in 2007, and it's highly unlikely in my opinion that we'll ever see it again — pinpoint control of synthesis and naturalness are inherently in tension, and the latter is a lot more valuable.
I like to hide all icons or folders on my Desktop when I need to be more productive or when I'm presenting. This can be done with:
# hide desktop icons and folders
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop 0
killall Finder # restarting Finder is required
# unhide desktop icons and folders
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop 1
killall Finder # restarting Finder is required
Turning off the desktop is one of the first things I do when setting up a new Mac. I still use ~/Desktop often enough that it's one of two folders I keep in the Dock (the other being ~/Downloads).
Although: the introduction of Stacks to the macOS desktop was a great thing — I always show that feature to anyone whose Desktop is helplessly cluttered with files.
I've used this one for over a decade now. When I was a teacher, I even assigned it to a key-combo. Consider pairing with a few other things you might want in a presentation setting
Yes, this is great... I was given a Macbook with a Norweigan keyboard for testing a port of FreeBSD on it, and I quickly discovered that the keyboard layout remapping stuff available via the UI won't remap at least this one key to what I'd find on my US keyboard.
Years ago, I wrote a script to find something in a big blob of data and to alert me when it was done, I added a “say <some glib Rambo or Schwarzenegger>” type phrase upon completion. I forgot about it and went to bed and was jolted awake hours later by what was clearly an “intruder” speaking to his accomplice, in my home office. Quite the relief when I realized what happened.
I use Pushover for a few alerts so years ago I wrote a little bash script called `push` that you pass a title and optionally a body. Was very nice to to `./longRunningCommand && push "Task Done" "Here is a body"`. I'd sometimes combine this with my `beep` script that just makes a noise for when I know I'll still be at my computer but want to know when something finishes.
Here is my beep script, it's almost embarrassingly basic. You can pick a different sound, I wanted one that wasn't too offensive/harsh and I've used this for 3-4+ years.
That's hilarious! Similar vein: there is a Metasploit module to induce the say command on post-exploited mac machines. I haven't seen it used in practice, but I eagerly watch for the eventual twitter thread that reads:
"So, I used the msf module that invokes `say` on a client's laptop"
I often have multiple terminal tabs open. Sometimes I’ll run a command that ends up taking a while and switch away and forget about it.
So I added a fish command completion script that plays a beep with afplay if the task took longer than 5 seconds. It helps me get back on task for those “just long enough” tasks that I run.
Shoutout to the `diskutil` command line utility on macOS.
I had problems with some slices on a disk today, and was not able to fix it with the graphical Disk Utility that comes with macOS. These slices were remnants from experimenting with running Asahi Linux on the machine in the past.
I knew there had to be a way to fix it with diskutility cli program.
I found a thread, and the solution for what to do in such situation.
`diskutil` is great but it's a travesty what they did to Disk Utility.app. It never really got any love after the APFS transition and there are things it straight up fails to do the `diskutil` command doesn't. Before they re-designed the interface, it was such a rock-solid tool that even if it failed during some task, would typically tell you why. Now it's a baby LEGO Duplo interface meant for nothing more than reformatting a flash drive.
`open -a ...` tab completion has been horribly slow for years because Apple hasn’t updated their completion definition. I replied with a work around on this SO post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/63097652
One flag also not mentioned is -n, which allows you to run the same application in more than one instance. Historically the single most used utility for me, though the number of applications that have had design problems bad enough to warrant it has gone down.
I forget that's an option. I really dislike that and prefer for new tabs to open in my home directory. So having my `tab` alias that I use a couple times a week and opening the other 100 tabs in my home directory fits my workflow.
In your iterm profile settings, you can configure new tabs to go to either $HOME, $CWD, or a fixed specific directory. I've configured new windows and tabs to $HOME, but new split panes $CWD.
More than that, it sends a message to launchd/the app instead of forking on the spot.
Sadly the app does get the shell's environment and it can't be disabled:
Opened applications inherit environment variables just as if you had
launched the application directly through its full path. This behavior
was also present in Tiger.
Why this matters, e.g with vscode:
- ensure vscode is fully closed
- enter project directory, something sets vars in your shell (you manually or automatically via direnv)
- code .
- vscode process now has the env from the shell it was started
- open another directory from the UI
- vscode forks and inherits from its parent process, thus the other project window has the original shell's env
- go to another directory
- code .
- vscode finds out it's already running, forks and opens another window. this window has the original shell env
- fully quit vscode and reopen it, but via the app in /Applications
- vscode opens, now has a blank environment for its main process, and forks form there to restore previous windows, which now lack the environment they had
It's a) completely inconsistent and b) dangerous: imagine the original shell had a setting or secret in an env var that was shared to the second project (e.g virtualenv, deploy target, deployment key...)
The same issue can happen with other apps but also tmux (the tmux daemon is spawned from the first tmux command, and then subsequent sessions from tmux-server; doing it another way is possible but nontrivial)
It took me a while but I finally got open to open folders in a new Finder tab instead of opening a new window each time.
function opent () {
what=${1:-`pwd`}
what=$(cd "$what"; pwd)
osascript -e "tell application \"Finder\"
activate
set t to target of Finder window 1
set toolbar visible of window 1 to true
end tell
tell application \"System Events\"
keystroke \"t\" using command down
end tell
tell application \"Finder\"
set target of Finder window 1 to POSIX file \"$what\"
end tell" > /dev/null
}
## opens current dir
$ opent .
## same
$ opent
I also find myself using open -n -a <application> to open a new separate instance of an application if I want to copy settings from one file to another or work on two files with separate instances of a program
I set an alias in my shell so this is just 'airport', lets you interact with the wifi settings - I particularly like 'airport -s' for doing a scan of the local wifi networks, since it shows signal strength and channel information right there, which is helpful when troubleshooting.
It also separates 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz bands and shows security details (which matters sometimes e.g band steering or automatic same-SSID signal-strength-based AP selection doesn't work)
`ditto` will also preserve resource forks, which is occasionally necessary for not breaking apps or installer pkgs. I've had to use it when doing a semi-automated deployment of some zipped-up software to a hundred or so Macs via bash over ARD. `ditto -xkv`
IIRC Cmd+shift+4 by default stores to a file, but it is easily changeable in settings. Mine has been set to store to clipboard since a long time ago (since i mostly ever take them to send to someone in chat or to insert into my own notes, for which clipboard is exactly what i need).
To change it: open Screenshot app (either cmd+shift+5 or from the app launcher), click Options in the center bar, and set "Save to" to "clipboard". Now, all screenshots in the future will be going by default to clipboard. You can also pick many other destinations for saving, including any arbitrary directory or many other apps (e.g., mail, preview, etc.).
After some googling TIL, apparently if you use Ctrl key modifier with any screenshot shortcuts (cmd+shift+3/4), it will store to clipboard regardless of your setting. Kinda nifty for those who switch between storing to file/clipboard all the time.
Another good one is 'hidutil' which can remap any keys without additional software. It's handy for things like remapping CapsLock to anything, etc. For actual full keyboard layouts though I'd use Ukelele[0].
For audio there're also `afinfo` to probe metadata and `afconvert` to convert between different codec/container formats. I use them for podcast post-processing and archiving workflow.
macOS 13 Ventura ships with a customized `iperf3` called `iperf3-darwin` adding features like QUIC/L4S/MPTCP.
Is there a place Apple documents these things? Do people find these things with something like “ls /usr/bin” and wondering “what is this?” or does Apple have an administrator’s guide somewhere? Or has someone written a good book with this stuff?
Hi, author here. There isn't any official canonical documentation that I know of, outside of the individual man pages. This was a list of commands I've been maintaining for myself over the years and thought it would be useful to share.
If you want more like this, I also have another page full of lesser well-known macOS tips and tricks: https://saurabhs.org/macos-tips
I'd love some official Apple documentation. In lieu of that, you can search man pages with `man -f`, `whatis`, or `apropos`. I also keep the following aliases in my ~/.zshrc:
alias list-functions='functions -x4'
alias list-function-names='functions +'
alias list-aliases='alias'
alias list-alias-names='alias +'
alias list-commands='print -raC2 ${(kv)commands} | sort'
alias list-command-names='print -roC1 ${(k)commands}'
alias list-builtins='print -raC2 ${(kv)builtins} | sort'
alias list-builtin-names='print -roC1 ${(k)builtins}'
alias list-everything='whence -cm "[^_]*"'
alias list-everything-names='whence -wm "[^_]*"'
It's ls for metadata. Very helpful for getting quick and scripted access to the date/time when and the latitude/longitude where a photograph was taken.
Also, the say command is a lot more versatile than it seems.
Combined with the ability to save the speech to an audio file, my wife uses it as the disc jockey for her little hobby AM radio station. It introduces the song and does little station IDs and such.
You can customize it with dozens of dozens of voices, some in very high quality.
When a song from her Japanese playlists comes on, it switches to one of the Japanese voices. I don't speak Japanese, so I don't know if it actually translates the DJ words into Japanese, but it sounds pretty close to my untrained ears.
afconvert(1) lets you convert between various audio formats - most noteworthy is that it gives you access to Core Audio's superior AAC encoder without having to use iTunes/Music:
The `security` tool is handy too. I like the ability to store passwords in the `login` Keychain and automate using them in the terminal using `security find-generic-password`.
Agreed. Some of the flags are missing as well. Not sure it's updated often, but still not a bad starting point. If only Apple would publish something directly. They do a pretty good job with the Apple Platform Deployment guide (https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment). And the Security guide (https://support.apple.com/guide/security).
You can also prepend #!/usr/bin/osascript
to a script and then make it executable with chmod oag+x. You can then invoke it normally in bash:
./filename.sh (or whatever)
It’s weird how macs don’t come with a GUI for managing system services. Windows does.. that being said the number of times I’ve had to mess with system services on mac can probably be counted with a few fingers…
hdiutil: manipulate disk images (attach, verify, create, etc)
dscl: Directory Service command line utility (manage users and groups)
scutil: Manage system configuration parameters (useful for checking current DNS configuration and checking reachability to a host).
sysadminctl: It's a secret! No man page. Run without options to get a usage message, but even the usage is apparently incomplete. It's a grab-bag of functionality. I use for adding/removing a temporary build user as part of a CI/CD setup.
Amphetamine has been my go-to app for keeping my Mac alive, especially since Apple tried to remove it from the App Store because, according to [someone?], the name violated App Store rules.
Great list, working with Mac a long time and found some good things here. This might be useful too:
# cd to frontmost open finder folder (in Terminal cd to the current top finder window)
cdf() { cd "`osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to POSIX path of (insertion location as alias)'`"; pwd; }
# Copy the frontmost open finder folder Path from Terminal to the Clipboard in MacOS:
cpf() { echo "`osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to POSIX path of (insertion location as alias)'`"|pbcopy; }
# open manpage in preview app:
pman() { mandoc -T pdf "$(/usr/bin/man -w $@)" | open -fa Preview; }
# Function to delete a given line in ssh known_hosts file:
xho() { line=$1;tFile="$HOME/.ssh/known_hosts";sed -e "${line}d" -i ".tmp" "$tFile";}
Xcode uses `mdfind` to provide symbols in crash reports and for Instruments, and is the reason why it seems to have a life of its own and work only when it wants to. Spotlight indexing is extremely flaky for reasons I'm not aware of.
I don't even use Time Machine for my off-machine backups, but I use tmutil to create local snapshots so I can easily back out of changes by using the Time Machine GUI to restore files from the snapshot.
Neat, I was not aware of `networkQuality`. A good replacement for opening up Speedtest or whatnot when you just want to figure out if the network is slow or something else is up.
Try running it with `-s` to see if you get speed tests that resemble what you expect. The idea is that maxing out both links at once is a better measure of network quality than sequence speed tests. Also it’s new RTT metric is key.
It tests your bandwidth while fully saturating your upload AND your download. If maxing out your upload has a huge impact on your download (like, a 70% drop), then that’s probably a sign you could tweak your network for better flow control.
That’s sort of the idea of `networkQuality`. It’s a new idea for how to measure that’s different from the standard speed test.
Through if you run it with the `-s` flag it’ll test them sequentially.
In my case, it appears that maximizing my download has a huge impact on my upload as well, which makes sense from a TCP/IP point of view. In this case, do you mean the ISP's flow control?
I'm sure others know waaay more about this, but I think it's a thing you can improve locally. Though usually I think of it as the other way around, where maxing out upload severely impacts download. My understanding is that this causes bufferbloat[0], making packets queue up for a long time on your gateway, ultimately limiting you to way less bandwidth then you should be able to get.
My one experience with this is on Ubiquiti hardware where there's a feature called "Smart Queues" you can enable. Really it's FQ_CODEL[1] under the hood. If you tell it your real maximum up/down bandwidth, minus ~5%, it'll enforce those limits in a way that prevents buffer bloat and lets you use nearly your full download bandwidth even when your upload bandwidth is maxed out. On Ubiquiti gear this has a CPU impact since it has move some traffic handling from dedicated hardware to the CPU. But it was a huge night and day difference for me. After enabling this, having a couple people on Zoom calls (highish upload) no longer tanked everyone else's download speed.
Also I think this stuff matters more when you have a large multi-user network. For normal home life, definitely not worth it. (In my case it was wifi for ~20 people).
I name all my personal programs prefixed by the comma. I learnt it from someone on lobste.rs. No Unix utilities use the prefix in their name and it is a valid filename.
So I can type , and I am sure it's my program and I'm not running something else and it'll autocomplete among my list of programs.
This tool is invaluable, I love it so much. I have 2 workspaces and I love just running the command (via Alfred) when I plug into my dock at either place that fixes all my monitors. I could script it so that as soon as my computer recognizes a monitor UUID it fires off the correct displayplacer command but I don't switch often enough to care (the 2 desks are 3.5+ hours apart).
When I was commuting daily displayplacer was even more indispensable but even for just unplugging my mac and using the internal screen vs my monitors I get a ton of value out of this tool.
I use `caffeinate -dsim` permanently. In short I ask the computer to avoid any kind of sleep.
-d Create an assertion to prevent the display from sleeping.
-i Create an assertion to prevent the system from idle sleeping.
-m Create an assertion to prevent the disk from idle sleeping.
-s Create an assertion to prevent the system from sleeping. This
assertion is valid only when system is running on AC power.
say --rate=500 "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?"
That's surprising to me as well. I had no idea that caffeinate existed as a native tool on my mac. I've been relying on "Jolt of Caffeine" for the past 3 years.
I'll go for the somewhat obsolete `drutil eject` as Mac OS can be sometimes rather reluctant to eject cycle optical drives if it doesn't actually think a disc in in them. Although nowadays you'll probably be using a 3rd party tray load drive with an eject button instead of a no-button slot loading Apple one.
Also for things like sharing public ssh keys. Instead of "can you send me your public key" and getting something with random line breaks depending on the users text editor I just have to ask them to "cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy".
I also alias pbcopy / pbpaste on Linux too, so useful!
The random linebreaks are ok - SSH can handle them. (that's how Userify does it I think, too. it replicates whatever the user provides.. no judgment :)
dtrace and the DTrace Toolkit scripts are also quite useful for understanding and debugging things, e.g. `opensnoop -a` to print the result of all open syscalls on the system.
And urls! I use that one in a lot of my scripts. We have a ticket-based workflow, and I can parse out the ticket number from the current git branch, and open the ticket or create a merge requests without having to do anything complicated.
I use these commands a lot when I'm in a coffeeshop and I'm trying to fine-grain control which wifi connection my laptop is using and dealing with passwords.
IMO OSX's UI for wifi network picking is clunky when you're in an area with >50 wifi networks in range, command line tools are much easier to deal with.
I just tried the following: I copied all of my ~/.bash_history into GPT and asked it for some commands that would save me time.
It didn't quite work to identify "bad patterns" as I had hoped, but it did suggest the following:
1. bat: A `cat` clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.
2. htop: Interactive process viewer, a better alternative to `top`.
3. fzf: Command-line fuzzy finder to quickly search files, command history, etc.
4. tldr: Community-driven man pages with practical examples.
5. ripgrep (rg): Extremely fast text search tool, recursively searches directories for a regex pattern.
6. tmux: Terminal multiplexer to run multiple terminal sessions within a single window.
7. autoenv: Automatically source environment variables based on the current directory.
8. hub: Extends git with extra features and commands for GitHub.
9. ncdu: Disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface.
10. jq: Lightweight command-line JSON processor.
11. sshfs: Mount a remote filesystem using SFTP.
12. watch: Execute a program periodically, showing output fullscreen.
13. fd: Simpler and faster alternative to `find`.
14. z: Jump around directories based on frequent use.
15. lazygit: Simple terminal UI for git commands.
Most of them I already knew, but z seems like an interesting tool. The docs are here <https://github.com/rupa/z>:
z foo cd to most frecent dir matching foo
z foo bar cd to most frecent dir matching foo, then bar
z -r foo cd to highest ranked dir matching foo
z -t foo cd to most recently accessed dir matching foo
z -l foo list all dirs matching foo (by frecency)
Might start using it, if I'm not too stuck in my habits.
https://github.com/zcutlip/prefsniff can be handy for figuring this stuff out, you start it up, change a setting, and it reports the plist differences to you
I used to work at a 24 hr end user tech support call center. They didn’t use Macs, but we had a machine for the techs to use to understand what the customer is looking at. I wrote a script to sleep until late at night then start saying weird/creepy stuff to mess with the overnight crew.
A nice feature I discovered recently is -a: you can give it a specific audio device, which falls back to the default if not present. I use it to report when builds finish through my monitor speakers in case I'm not wearing headphones. If I'm on the go and don't have the monitor connected it plays through the speakers.
I remember Caffeine used to be a third-party program that would prevent your Mac from sleeping, same behavior as the `caffeinate` here. Were they acquired and incorporated into the OS?
From what I recall, caffeine app predated the caffeinate command (which was only introduced in lion). Caffeine.app also disables sleep via a completely different method than caffeinate. The latter uses a IOPMAssertion which is the recommended way to do it because it is visible in `pmset -g assertions` whereas the former doesn't use that approach (I forgot how exactly it did it, there's like 4 different methods on osx to prevent sleep).
Another one that comes in handy occasionally is afconvert to convert audio files. I like to add audio files (eg audio books, or guided meditations) to iTunes/Music or Books, and they are a little bit finicky in terms of what they accept and sync (I've had problems with files converted with ffmpeg).
I use this to convert an mp3 to a variable rate m4b for Books:
Probably want to check your policies if using a business-owned mac. Caffeinate probably violates your security policies if it’s a decent sized company.
`caffeinate` can set assertions, the same assertions that Zoom or PowerPoint or Keynote do to stop the screen going to sleep during a meeting or presentation, the same assertions that the browsers can set during streaming video, so you absolutely can bypass whatever your admins set using `caffeinate -dmisu` which sets every assertion available.
You may have to install extra voices somehow, looking at the manpage for say, it seems like 'say -v ?' would list the voices installed, but I don't seem to have any (like Whisper), though plain old 'say "hello world"' does do a robotic voice which must be the default.
Thanks, I found those with some digging, I see that even just adding Whisper it's a 3.8GB dl, mostly to upgrade the default voice apparently - I guess that's why it isn't all included by default I guess!
Not sure if you can install additional voices using the command line, but the way you do it in the UI is Preferences -> Accessibility -> Spoken Content, then select customize in the voice selector and finally select the voice you want to add.
Isn't there `xsel` or `xclip` installed instead [0]? These two commands are commonly used on the Linux boxes and they support pipes too. For example, the xclip is used by the original password-store implementation [1].
On [2] you might find the aliases to pbutil for X11-based Linuxes.
[0]: If not, why not run apt-get command to install one of them, like xclip?
Is there any easy shortcut to resizing an image by percentage or fitting to a specific size?
Many a times, a website says "file needs to be no bigger than 2 MB", and I need to scramble with Preview app to resize teh app until it falls below that limit. A cli tool for that action would be very handy.
I didn't know about `taskpolicy`, I'll add it to my list. It will be handy now that it's getting hot around here for long running commands that I don't mind waiting for, Apple Silicon Macs run cooler than Intel's but they can still get very hot when maxed out.
When a new MacOS release comes out, one of the first things I look for is adds and changes to the command line tools. Sadly they are not the things that most people care about on a new release.
At the risk of sounding like an idiot, can someone please explain why I cannot use `networkQuality` when zsh is my shell? Is there an alternative for zsh?
It's dependent on the voice you pick in system settings. If you choose one of the siri voices for the system voice (not in the siri settings, iirc), it sounds much more natural.
Interesting so many useful commands, but they didn't have time to fix basics like scroll wheel, so you have to install 3rd party apps to set it independently from the touch pad and then it still manages to swap it around at random times.
Am I the only one who finds macOS so annoying?
I mean the apps for scroll wheel, alt-tab and what not...
The issues I have are touch-dragging with the touchpad, and no window docking. Docking I fixed by buying 'Magnet', touch dragging is still annoying. They have a setting that is supposed to enable 'double tap drag' like windows, but when you let go, it keeps dragging for some random amount of time, making it unusable.
Many thanks OP for the couple of commands I did not yet know. Especially `pbcopy` and `pbpaste`, those are going to be very useful.
Here are a couple of commands I use quite a lot.
lsof -p <PID>
Lists the open files of the process with process ID <PID>. Very very useful.
fs_usage -w <PID>
This one is mentioned by others here as well, but followed by a <PID> it shows all filesystem activity of the given process. Useful if you want to know where specific settings of an application are stored.
top -u
Obvious what this does, standard command. Sorted by CPU usage.
<some command> | open -ft
Opens the <some command>'s result in your default text editor.
system_profiler
Very useful for finding out stuff.
E.g. system_profiler SPNVMeDataType SPSerialATADataType | grep 'BSD Name: disk[0-9]$' | sed 's/.\* //'
Gives the device name of all your system's SATA and NVMe SSD's.
sysctl -a
Another way to find out stuff.
E.g. sysctl -a | grep hw.memsize
Shows the amount of physical memory in your system.
tmutil
Very powerful for managing Time Machine as mentioned by others here. Also useful for other stuff. There is a lot of File I/O on my system due to running at least five VM's all the time. This produces big snapshots. Every now and then my system hung up due to running out of space because of these snapshots. Now I'm running my own "snapshottaper" daemon running every ten minutes keeping only the last 4 snapshots and deleting the rest, using "tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates" and "tmutil deletelocalsnapshots" which eliminates that issue (which is a bug imho).
And some of my often used (tcsh) aliases:
proc, aliased to 'ps -axww -o pid,user,command | grep -v "grep -i" | grep -i \!\* | sed "s/^\ *//"'
Filter the list of running processes for a specific string, e.g. use "proc adobe" to find all running processes by Adobe. I use this a lot.
spf, aliased to 'dig \!* txt | grep "v=spf"'
Useful for finding SPF records for a given domain, e.g. 'spf apple.com'.
List all processes currently listening on network ports.
router, aliased to 'netstat -rn -f inet | grep default | grep -v link | awk \{print\ \$2\} | head -1'
List the currently used internet router.
(I hope all escape characters and such survive posting this, please excuse me if they don't, also my default command shell is tcsh for historical reasons, it was my default shell in the early 1990's. Yes my shell scripts are all #!/bin/sh)
Other than these, I really like using AppleScript and shell scripts together. Using AppleScript I now have my own GUI tools for making disk images using drag-and-drop, compacting sparse images, performing default settings for new installations, switching between virtual machines whilst hiding others, etc.
Hi, author of the post here. No part of this post was generated via ChatGPT (or any other AI). I had been maintaining my own list of commands I've used over the years and decided to publish it on my website.
While you're at it, `brew install coreutils`. The coreutils that ship with macOS lack a lot of features available on Linux. If you use bash, I recommend upgrading it, too, since Apple ships a 16 year old build (iirc due to legal issues associated with GPLv3) `brew install bash`
They come from BSD (and, nitpick, are not called coreutils). These BSD tools lack features mostly only if you're used to GNU coreutils.
The expanse of GNU coreutils features is questionable too: some are nice, some you can do without easily and rarely to never miss, and some are downright annoying (yes I'm looking at you, ls with colors+quotes)
Last time I used macOS (which was 6 years ago) there was no extended expressions, or the regex syntax was limited. I forget (again, haven't used an apple product in years)
Sure but with this you get all the other improved core utils like sed, etc. GNU utils just blow BSD/macOS out of the water. Personally, macOS seems to me like a half baked development platform in general
Having ChatGPT or equivalent create a basic Makefile for these commands (and other commands) is a quick way to preserve your process for later. You can show it your file structure first too.
