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Comment by anon4711 | Hacker News Reader

The use-case? Well, you have a process that will run for a long time. You don't want to keep a terminal open. You /could/ just detach it. Now what if you want to kill it? Open another terminal, kill it by PID or through pkill. Clicking a button might be more convenient.

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Exactly. And other convenient features like termination notification and file system monitoring.

And sometimes you'd want to watch the output. I like it.. Less clutter.

Screen? Tmux?

>Marathono is a small GUI tool that helps you manage long-running processes in macOS, so you don't have to maintain multiple windows/tabs/tmux sessions in your Terminal.

How about one tmux session and a couple of windows? You could name the windows perhaps. I could see how this might not scale, but I bet my socks someone else has found a way to script this and make it easy.

I know we don't want to be overly negative on HN, but this doesn't sound like a problem that needed a completely newly rolled solution.

So you have GUI output. What if I want to grep or save it to a file? I can see how this will be usable for people who aren't comfortable with a terminal--as a someone who transplated linux-to-mac, I know how terrible the terminal experience is on mac.

EDIT: below I was corrected that Marathono does all manipulating text output, +1.

I find that Windows developers seem more comfortable with GUI-heaviness in their dev environment, Linux developers seem less comfortable with it, and Mac is in kind of an odd gray zone in between. This seems fitting for the general style of the OS - sometimes sacrificing power to make things "just work" in a minimal UI.

There might be cases where I would find it useful but overall its usefulness is subjective and dependent on what you're looking for in your workflow/workspace.

> So you have GUI output.

Which seems like it would be a Big Deal, for a Mac user. The entire appeal of the Mac (for a developer) is that it layers a friendly GUI over a Unix-ey foundation. Presumably a user who values that GUI would also value GUI-oriented ways to do things that were previously terminal-only.

If "just use screen" was an answer that would make that user happy, they wouldn't have spent the extra money to buy a Mac in the first place.

The "Show Output" menu of Marathono opens a Terminal/iTerm tab to tail the output. Currently Marathono is designed for start-and-forget kind of processes - outputs are for occasional debugging purpose only.

That's good to know, I clicked around looking for a hint of whether it did that. Thanks for informing the conversation.

Does this have to be the case? I have a couple of long running processes that I would really like to check the output of from time to time. Couldn't you have an option to just show the last line for example? Was super excited to see this as I've been bugged by exactly this but if I can't see the output it's a dealbreaker for me unfortunately

What do think would be a place to show "the last line"? Or would [1] be more useful for your use case? If not, would you mind creating a new issue?

1. https://gitlab.com/marathono/marathono/issues/7

Posted an issue here: https://gitlab.com/marathono/marathono/issues/10

This feels like a caricature of Mac users. I mean, I like solid GUIs for graphical-friendly tasks. But launchd already exists and this doesn't even use that.

Launchd is a pain in the ass. And a poorly documented one at that. When they changed how it worked in a fundamental way somewhat recently (Yosemite I think) they couldn't even be assed to update their online documentation.

I wouldn't mind if this used launchd under the hood though.

The main benefit for me is it saves all the commands you want to commonly run. So for things like an SSH tunnel, rather than having to keep some snippet around to copy/paste into that new tmux window (yes, I use tmux extensively), I can just put all the random SSH tunnel strings I need into one list, and turn them on/off as needed.

Also, I have to disagree with the terminal experience on the mac being terrible. Between iTerm and brew, I've never come across anything I couldn't do, but that could be done on linux.

Usually when I want to repeat something, I make a script. Copy and pasting more than 4 times usually prompts me to make a script or an alias.

I mean, you are of course free to do what ever you want to do and have which ever workflow you feel comfortable with.

Screen solves this, and is remotely accessible :)

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