Jun 06, 2020 Terminal.Gui respects common Mac and Windows keyboard idoms as well. For example, clipboard operations use the familiar Control/Command-C, X, V model. CTRL-Q is used for exiting views (and apps). Driver model. Currently Terminal.Gui has support for ncurses, System.Console, and a full Win32 Console front-end. Login directly to terminal instead of GUI. Ask Question Asked 6 years, 4 months ago. Active 4 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 17k times 20. First: I'm obviously not talking about logging in and then automatically launching Terminal.app. In older versions of Mac OS X, you used to be.
In some flavors of Unix, you feel as if you've been cast into an alternate universe when you open a terminal window and work on the command line. https://brownvision390.weebly.com/blog/canon-ip1700-driver-download-mac. But with OS X and its Darwin core, there's often an elegant integration between the two. In this how-to I'll show you how to launch an OS X app from the command line with the open command.
[Note: A little bit of prior UNIX experience will be helpful here.]
First off, I will admit this technique is fairly geeky. In my [Mac] OS X career, I've only used this trick a handful of times. However, it's so darn cool and charming that one just aches to use it at any opportunity.
Actually, upon reflection, there are some useful scenarios for this technique.
- The Finder acts up, a terminal window is already open, and you'd like to be able to launch a GUI app that might help you diagnose the problem.
- You're a UNIX professional, live and breathe the command line, but you'd rather use a GUI text editor for coding instead of the raw and ugly vi or Emacs editors.
- You're writing, say, a Perl or Python script, for another user and, at some point in the script, you'd like to launch a GUI app that carries the workflow forward.
- You want to quickly run a utility with admin privileges without the restriction of the account you're logged into. See, for example, 'How to Find & Recover Missing Hard Drive Space.' In that case, you must bypass the open command and drill into the Package Contents to run the app with sudo and admin privileges. But I've digressed.
The Man Page
The terminal app is in the Utilities folder—which is found the Applications folder. Launch it now. The BSD UNIX command we'll be using is open. Below is the manual page ('man' for short), shown by typing:
I've printed most of the man page for the open command here for your perusal, but I'm not going to explore every argument. And feel free to jump right to the examples below to whet your appetite.
For this limited how-to, one interesting way to use the open command in this context is to use the [-a] option. Some other useful variations and arguments are in the examples below.
Typical Examples
Here are some short and sweet examples of the open command with the -a, -e, and -t arguments. They're easy to try. [If you don't have BBEdit installed, use any other favorite a text editor in /Applications.]
Open Doors
These are just a few of the cool things you can do on the command line with the open command. To keep things simple, I haven't delved into creating a search path or other Unix tricks like aliases. All that's been left for you to explore on your own.
I think this is one of the neatest tricks in OS X.
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Mac Gui Development
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