macOS command-line tools you might not know about | Hacker News Reader

macOS command-line tools you might not know about

saurabhs.org

2,039 pointsGadiguibou442 comments

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:

    mkdir MyIcon.iconset
    cp Icon1024.png MyIcon.iconset/icon_512x512@2x.png
    sips -z 16 16     Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_16x16.png
    sips -z 32 32     Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_16x16@2x.png
    sips -z 32 32     Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_32x32.png
    sips -z 64 64     Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_32x32@2x.png
    sips -z 128 128   Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_128x128.png
    sips -z 256 256   Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_128x128@2x.png
    sips -z 256 256   Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_256x256.png
    sips -z 512 512   Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_256x256@2x.png
    sips -z 512 512   Icon1024.png --out MyIcon.iconset/icon_512x512.png
    iconutil -c icns MyIcon.iconset

As a bonus, generate .ico with ffmpeg:

    ffmpeg -i MyIcon.iconset/icon_256x256.png icon.ico

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?

additional bonus, you can input an SVG at the start if you use qlmanage first instead of the cp command:

qlmanage -t -s 1024x1024 -o MyIcon.iconset/Icon1024.png icon.svg

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).

That’s fair. I will say, I’ve found that svgs that only rendered “right” in Adobe/Affinity to be broken most other places too.

May be a version thing, may be some extended stuff that more common parsers do not support, not sure.

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.

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/new-in-10-2-2-component-icons/

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.

Perfect timing. I need to generate an.icns today and I'm going to try this. Thanks :)

`pbcopy` and `pbpaste` are one of my most-loved in the list.

Dealing with some minified json, switching to iTerm, doing `pbpaste | json_pp | pbcopy` and having a clean output is _so_ nice.

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.

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.

+1 to the service menu actions. They are so handy, but often forgotten/overlooked. I think maybe a discoverability issue.

I have linux/macos-agnostic bash functions in my dotfiles that unify this to “clip” and “paste” (since “copy” is too close semantically to “cp”)

paste(1) is a POSIX standard utility, though (going back to System III), pairing with cut(1).

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/p...

The Unix join command is also useful:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_(Unix)

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:

    clip | tr '\n' ' ' | clip

https://github.com/svieira/dotfiles/blob/a3654d6a194e3689978...

    # Use clipboard in shell pipelines
    # clip | xargs echo           # uses pbpaste
    # ps -A | grep search | clip  # uses pbcopy
    clip() {
      [ -t 0 ] && pbpaste || pbcopy
    }

Holy crap. Of course! You win! Amazing!

Simple is genius

So to check if there's anything sitting on stdin without reading it I've been using

`if read -r -t0; then` # returns true if there is data but times out instantly so it doesn't consume any

Is `[ -t 0 ]` more idiomatic? Apparently it fails on this case: function < file

`read -r -t0` is Bash-only though and not POSIX, but it will work regardless of what type of data is on stdin

[ -t 0 ] instead checks whether stdin (fd 0) is a tty.

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'

Here's the xclip way (almost the same actually).

    alias pbcopy="xclip -selection clipboard"
    alias pbpaste="xclip -selection clipboard -o"

I use this, and another Mac affordance I copy in Linux is

    alias open="xdg-open"

There's `wl-copy` and `wl-paste` for Wayland users too, via https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard

And `cb` which works cross-platform, via https://github.com/Slackadays/clipboard

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...`.

  [0] https://github.com/astrand/xclip
  [1] https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard

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’ll have to try that. More than once I’ve been logged in to a remote host and got “pbcopy not found” “What!?… oh, right.“

The tmux integration in iterm is also very nice for remote work if you haven’t tried it out.

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...).

If I had a nickel for each `cat foo.json | jq | pbcopy`, I'd be a rich man :)

That's a useless use of cat. You can use `jq . foo.json | pbcopy` or `jq < foo.json | pbcopy`.

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.

You could consider

    < foo.json jq | pbcopy

Yes, this iterative procedure is often why "useless" cats get put into it. It's a very effective way of processing regular text information.

e.g.

I need to grab some info from textfile.txt to use as arguments to a function.

cat textfile.txt

looks like its comma delimited.

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 2-5

ah, its the third and fourth column i need

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep '123456'

perfect

cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep 123456 | tr , ' '

myfunc $(cat textfile.txt | cut -d, -f 3-4 | grep 123456 | tr , ' ')

> cat textfile.txt

> looks like its comma delimited.

Interesting; why wouldn't you use `head`? Who knows how big textfile.txt is?

`file` will tell you too

Won't tell you the delimiter.

Don't forget to pipe head into 'cat -v'... that text file could contain _anything_!

Thank you for pointing this out! This is much safer.

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.

My useless cat is that I always use `cat file | less` when I could just `less file`.

I've been typing cat for over 25 years. Old habits die hard.

I hate that when I use `less`, then quit, the output goes away.

You can run "less -X" for that, but it may have other problems depending on how you use less (e.g. scrolling up, etc.)

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've been using bat as a cat replacement for a while now. It includes paging, syntax highlighting, line numbers, and is generally very performant.

https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

If you're using zsh, you can just replace any instance of

    $ cat somefile ...

with

    $ <somefile ...

For bash, this only works if you have at least one `|`.

I did this last time I saw it come up and was surprised! Doing it makes perfect sense in hindsight. Neato!

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.

In what way do you see those alternatives as superior?

They avoid an unnecessary invocation of the cat executable.

Instead, they open a file descriptor and pass that.

Tiny difference but there you go.

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 *”.

Yes.

Even the Wikipedia page on cat has a section about that, titled eponymously.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_(Unix)

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.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/copy_file_range.2

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/cat...

>They avoid an unnecessary invocation of the cat executable.

And ... ?

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.

In short, I straight up don't care.

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.

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.

Interesting.

Maybe use dd with one of its blocksize options, then?

Not at a terminal, can't check.

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.

[1] http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/

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.

This. "Useless cat" is more useful than "useless file-arg".

The redirect always works though - that is not a program argument, that is handled by the shell. Apparently not everyone is aware of that.

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?

Everyone is not aware, new people are joining all the time.

Is there any shell that has cat as a built-in?

Such a shell could remove some of the more common cases.

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.

> All of them do. Including bash.

Are you sure? https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/208615/is-cat-a-she... disagrees and neither https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man7/bash-builtin... nor https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Shell-Builtin-Command... mention it

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)

https://porkmail.org/era/unix/award

Extra handy when combined with `piknik`[1] for distributed/cross-Apple account clipboard shenanigans.

[1] https://github.com/jedisct1/piknik

I like to use `pbcopy` when exporting public keys to external services like GitHub.

`cat ~/.ssh/mykey.pub | pbcopy`

You can even simplify this further by feeding `pbcopy` the key directly using file redirection instead of a pipe:

`pbcopy < ~/.ssh/mykey.pub`

(I use this all the time myself!)

I love this tool too!

except one time I quickly typed

`cat ~/.ssh/mykey | pbcopy`

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!

I might start naming my private key files ~/.ssh/keyname.PRIVATE after hearing that story...

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.

Userify would have made that pretty painless (all it really seems to do is update the authorized_keys across all of your servers every minute or so)

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)

If you literally have ssh root access to 1000+ servers, using certificates will be more secure and convenient than directly using public key.

put your private key in something like Secretive: https://github.com/maxgoedjen/secretive

Where are you pasting the pretty json to view it?

I do this a lot as well, but just paste the minified json directly into VS Code and then OPT+SHIFT+F to format it.

`jq` acts as a pretty json viewer (among other things)

Those are so useful that I wrote trivial shell functions that do the same under Linux.

Since I'm bouncing between OSX and Linux a lot, I have a shell script with the same name on each that boils down to:

  if [ `uname` == "Darwin" ]; then
    pbcopy
  else
    xsel --clipboard
  fi

why not just alias?

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.

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.

Another frequent use I have, applying random diffs with git:

    git diff | pbcopy
    pbpaste | git apply

You can also use `git format-patch` and `git am` if you want to apply the same commit to multiple repos, a use-case I sometimes I have.

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 :)

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.

TIL about named pasteboards https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nspasteboar...

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.

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:

  #!/usr/bin/env python3
  import sys
  import json
  
  print(json.load(sys.stdin))

Or directly from the commandline:

    pbcopy | python -c 'import sys; import json; print(json.load(sys.stdin))' | pbpaste

The Python json library is callable as a module:

    pbcopy | python -m json.tool | pbpaste

It has a load options:

    $ 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)

It's cool to use pbcopy and pbpaste with your phone! Copy some text on the phone, and you can pbpaste it onto the Mac command line. So cool.

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.

Disabling Handoff is currently the only way to disable Universal Clipboard.

* Mac: Go to System Preferences > General > uncheck Allow Handoff.

* iPhone: Go to Settings > General > Handoff > uncheck Handoff.

Make sure both your phone and computer have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on.

I'm curious why the Bluetooth is required?

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.)

The requirements are here: https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT209455

Turning off Bluetooth or wifi may be one of the more common reasons it doesn’t work. Some people never do that, but others do.

Yes.

For me it’s one of the top benefits of the Apple ecosystem.

The only drawback is that yes it only works most of the time. And when it doesn’t I get infuriated.

Glitches happen without any change to settings or network on my side - it works now, and 5 min later doesn’t.

Integration is the primary reason I enjoy using Apple ecosystem. My phone, laptop, tablet and watch all work seamlessly together.

I use most of Apple's "built in" applications like Mail, Notes, Photos, etc. with Firefox (instead of Safari) probably the only exception to that.

It’s wonderful when it works. For reasons beyond my comprehension, the Watch unlock for my Mac only works ~10% of the time.

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%)

https://georgegarside.com/blog/macos/fix-apple-watch-auto-un...

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.)

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.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uipasteboard...

Yes it’s 1Password. I use the very old, iOS only non subscription version 7.something. But I think sometimes it works (copy from iOS paste on MacOS).

Wonder how many of us are out there!? Long live this app and workflow, iCloud sync ftw.

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.

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.

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 wonder if it's this one: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/paste-clipboard-manager/id9678...

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 think iOS now has per-app permissions/notifications around clipboard reads.

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.

> is unexpectedly shared between my phone and computer

There was a prompt asking if I wanted to enable it, when I set up my phone/Mac. Same setup screen that asks if you want to enable location, Siri, etc.

Use the Apple shortcuts app and you can just copy some text and hit a keyboard shortcut. The Shortcuts app lets you run arbitrary shell command.

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.)

Json pretty printing in the terminal? Bless, didn't know about that and it is perfect

pb[paste|copy] are a life improver. Here is a one-liner to edit the pasteboard contents in vim.

  pbpaste > tmp; vim tmp; cat tmp | pbcopy; rm tmp;

I also use pbpaste to append various notes to files, but since pbpaste doesnt have a newline at the end I wind up using:

  echo "$(pbpaste)" >> notes.txt

You can do this specific task with just vim: https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/21448

Also a fun one to combine with `open` if you have a bunch of web URLs to open

I have a script always running that polls for youtube URLs using pbpaste and runs yt-dl

then just highlight any youtube link and COPY

later when I have time, I can use quicklook to browse directory of youtube videos.

That’s a great hack thanks for the tip.

FYI: yt-dlp is more up to date and faster, AFIK: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

I download and save it as 'ytdl' for convenience, but I use it all the time on twitter too.

sorry mistyped, that's what I use

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!

That sounds amazing, I always wanted to do that! Do you have a guide or some script to help with it? Otherwise, I will try to do it on my own.

Happy to share, but I'm away from my MacBook for the next 2-3 weeks. I'll ping you when I have access to the code again.

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 :)

You might want to have a look at osc52

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).

Simply wrap your shell with osc52pty to get OSC52 support in Terminal.app

https://github.com/roy2220/osc52pty

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.

But thank you for the share, it is interesting!

[1]: https://github.com/roy2220/osc52pty/blob/master/oscexecutor....

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 use the following to edit contents of my clipboard:

    pbpaste | vipe | pbcopy

Where vipe is a util for inserting your editor (vim) in the middle of a pipe. From: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

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

I think you have to use `pbfilter vipe`, as the argument to pbfilter is inserted into the middle of the pipe.

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'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.

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.

alias clip='pbcopy <'

Best way to get ssh keys into the paste buffer too.

my favorite vim command:

:w !pbcopy

or visual selection, and then :w !pbcopy

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

You can do similar magic with Charles Proxy fyi

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/

Thanks for sharing.

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.

I don’t remember, or have context for how it feels when it’s instant, so I’m a bad tester.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t like it, a tiny bit of latency seems like a killer in that scenario

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.

You can be an ultra nerd on Linux and go this with the networking QoS tools: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control-HOWTO/components.html

Network Link Conditioner rules. I pair it with `mitmproxy` for debugging native apps.

You can also use `rvictl` to connect to a development iOS device’s network device for grab a tcp dump.

Also Instruments has a really nice network capture tool now.

[Comcast](https://github.com/tylertreat/comcast) also does this for macOS, BSD, and Linux. And it's _brilliantly_ named.

Thanks! I'm on BSD so this is great to hear!

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.

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.

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".

See: Apple's Speech Synthesis Programming Guide, https://josh8.com/blog/img/speech-synthesis.pdf

I also wrote more about this here: https://josh8.com/blog/commandline-audio-mac.html

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.

It is unfortunate. But Alex does sound pretty good! Not up to 2023 standards maybe but still pretty good.

Thanks for posting! I'm always glad when I discover good blogs like yours.

Thank you for the article :) One small correction, the command to list the voices is `say -v '?'`

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

I made myself a convenient bash alias for this which lets me simply toggle the desktop on and off Here is a gist: https://gist.github.com/berndverst/6f58c0d6aedddb6c06c23e57d...

  toggledesktop () {
    if [[ $(defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop) -eq "0" ]]
    then
        export SHOWDESKTOP=1;
        echo "Unhiding Desktop icons"
    else
        export SHOWDESKTOP=0;
        echo "Hiding Desktop icons"
    fi
    defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop $SHOWDESKTOP
    killall Finder
  }

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

What do you use for assigning it to a key combination? Can it be done without a third party tool?

Automator should be able to do that.

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.

Nice list.

Also, hidutil (https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2450...).

Example:

     hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000049,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x700000065}]}'

For my PC keyboard, remaps "Ins" (normally useless under macOS) to something ("PC Execute") I can trap and remap with Keyboard Maestro.

    hidutil property --set '{"UserKeyMapping":[{"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingSrc":0x700000064,"HIDKeyboardModifierMappingDst":0x700000035}]}'

Remaps top left key on Euro-style keyboards from useless "paragraph" to useful "backtick".

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.

not to be confused with hdiutil:

    hdiutil detach /Volumes/some-usb-drive

    hdiutil makehybrid -joliet -o foo.iso ./srcfolder/

There's a nice generator for these mappings https://hidutil-generator.netlify.app/

Oh wow, this is amazing. I had been unable to _swap_ esc and caps lock on the mac until now.

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.

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 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.

What's the beep script like? Do you use the terminal bell or does it synthesize a tone?

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.

#!/bin/bash

afplay -v 3 /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff

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.

I like to use the "research complete" sample from StarCraft for this.

It's comments like this that remind me that HN is my tribe.

I would pay a lot of money to switch the voice to Arnold.

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.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/411544/cant-reclai...

Now the disk can be fully utilised by macOS again.

`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.

I still open it sometimes thinking it's going to be a great experience, forgetting about this.

You should check out "um" https://github.com/promptops/cli for when you can't remember the command/parameters.

~ um prevent my mac from sleeping for 30m

   caffeinate -u -t 1800
    don't see what you're looking for? try providing more context

Hey, this looks awesome. Thanks so much for the pointer.

`open` is one I use all the time. I love that simple command.

    alias tab='open . -a iterm'
    alias phpstorm='open -a "PhpStorm"'
    alias smerge='open -a "Sublime Merge"'

etc. I use those more than I do the Open/Recents dialogs in the respective apps.

To open a new finder window in the current directory in a terminal:

    alias finder='open .'

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 made a script to open files with rofi

https://github.com/davatorium/rofi

Looks like this:

https://i.imgur.com/Hm9TGeV.jpg

In a vscode terminal I just use the alias "o" and it opens that at the correct location, then I can navigate and pick a file to open in the editor.

> alias tab='open . -a iterm'

But if you just open a new tab, you'll be in the same $CWD in the new tab? Am I missing some trick here?

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.

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.

Sublime Text and Sublime Merge actually ship with these CLI utilities by default, which have some additional features:

    $ fd 's(merge|ubl)$' /Applications/Sublime*                                          
    /Applications/Sublime Merge.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/smerge
    /Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl

I knew of (and use) `subl` but was unaware they provided their own `smerge`. I'll delete my own alias in favor of that. Thanks!

`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

When mentioning `open` they should have noted that `open <file>` will open the given file with its associated app.

It’s indispensable.

Especially

    open .

if you need to drag a file somewhere. One thing that kind of breaks my muscle memory here is the opposite, something like

    firefox file.html

doesn't work and you have to fiddle with the arguments to get open to launch a non-default application.

If you set

    alias firefox="open -a Firefox"

This will work

I use `open .` to open up a Finder window of the directory I'm currently in using Terminal so frequently that I've set up an alias for it --

  alias op='open .'

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

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)

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/15452

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/108804#issuecomme...

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

  /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport

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)

A fun one I use surprisingly often is

    open -h AppKit.h

to open any system header file (or I guess any header in the standard include path? It finds stuff from Homebrew too.)

Use ‘ditto’ for copying directories. It is fast!

https://osxdaily.com/2014/06/11/use-ditto-copy-files-directo...

Ditto can also be useful for backup and restore since, AFAICT, it preserves file meta data. (Unlike rsync for example.)

`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`

Surprised pngpaste isn't mentioned (in the article nor the comments).

If you take a screen shot (command + shift + 4) or partial screen shot (command + shift + control + 4) you can save it directly to an image file with:

pngpaste filename.png

Both commands you listed take a partial screenshot. The first one saves it to the desktop and the second one (with control) to the clipboard.

Oops, you're right. I meant command + shift + control + 3 (full screen to clipboard) and command + shift + control + 4 (partial screen to clipboard).

command shift 4 already saves a file, maybe you were thinking about command + shift + control + 3?

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.

You can also right-click the screenshot thumbnail to save to clipboard or some other location on a one-off basis.

You can also use shift-cmd-5 to frame the page and then cmd-c to copy the screenshot - regardless of the screenshot app settings.

`pngpaste` doesn’t ship with macOS. All the tools in the article do.

I configured the screenshot to file to automatically save them to ~/Desktop/screenshots instead of ~/Desktop using the Screenshot app to avoid cluttering the desktop. See https://www.hellotech.com/guide/for/how-to-change-where-scre...

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].

[0] https://software.sil.org/ukelele

There is a helper tool for hidutil https://hidutil-generator.netlify.app/

> It's handy for things like remapping CapsLock to anything

It's a built-in MacOS feature that you can find in the keyboard settings.

“to anything” is the key difference. MacOS only lets you remap it to other control keys.

Yeah, I've missed that part.

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.

QUIC already? Cool

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

Oh my, and a bucket load of iOS tips too!

TIL you can tap and drag with 2 fingers to multi-select list items in mail and notes, etc

Bless you for finding and collating

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 "[^_]*"'

Edit: another commenter posted what looks to be comprehensive docs/lists here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36492487

qlmanage is super useful for converting SVG to PNG easily, too! I use it like this:

qlmanage -t -s 1000x1000 -o ~/Pictures/foo.png ~/Pictures/foo.svg

To turn an square SVG into a PNG without installing anything extra or using an online image tool

One I use a lot: mdls.

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:

  afconvert music.wav -o music_160kbps_aac.m4a -b 160000 -q 127 -s 2 -f m4af -d 'aac '

lipo(1) lets you operate (replace/extract/thin/etc) on executables and libraries to tailor their supported architectures:

  lipo <universal exe/dylib> -thin arm64e -output <new apple silicon-only exe/dylib>

Also, using hdiutil(1) and diskutil(8) to create a RAM-disk:

  # 500 megabytes disk image
  mb=$((500*2048))
  diskutil eraseVolume ExFAT my_ramdisk `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://$mb`

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`.

    security find-generic-password -gw -l "${keychain_id}"

Super helpful for VPN automation scripts, easy logins to things like Vault, etc. The security tool has tons of other handy functions as well.

Not a bad list of basic macOS specific cli tools. For a more in depth list, I usually reference https://ss64.com/osx/.

A tad outdated. At a glance I see it’s missing `networkQuality` (introduced in Monterey) and `realpath` (added in Ventura).

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).

I maintain updated lists here:

https://manp.gs/mac/1/

https://manp.gs/mac/8/

That's awesome. Bookmarked for later!

Yes it is, but the forum is current and the creator replies very actively. I’ll ask if he plans update.

Manage the Launch Services database:

  /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister

Manage file extended attributes (such as quarantine):

  xattr

Execute a script (AppleScript or JavaScript):

  osascript -e <statement>

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…

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)

Wut? No fs_usage? Easily one of the most useful of them all ..

https://www.manpagez.com/man/1/fs_usage/

I can't count the number of times a bit of fs_usage foo has helped me dig out of a seriously messy pile of network, file and page fault issues ..

Useful, but definitely more niche & less generally applicable than the others.

Some that were missed:

diskutil: modify, verify and repair local disk

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.

Caffeinate is definitely the one I miss most on Windows. Super handy to keep your machine awake whilst some task is ongoing.

I’ve been looking for a better way to do this than just setting my PC to never sleep. Thanks for this. Now I need to find a Mac alternative as well.

caffeinate is on Mac.

  caffeinate -d -i -u -s

Thanks very much for this.

keeping you awake wraps this up in a menu bar icon that makes it easy to toggle on or off

https://keepingyouawake.app/

If you're able to install PowerToys it includes a utility for this

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/awake

I believe you can still get it, if not, there are similar like Amphetamine

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.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704

I switched to Amphetamine a few years back because caffeinate doesn't work consistently.

There is a counterpart: https://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/caffeine/

If you need a more featureful alternative to textutils, look for pandoc https://github.com/jgm/pandoc

A strong second to this, it was going to be my own comment ;-)

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.

It was nice to find out that macOS has a tool similar to Valgrind called `leaks` that helps you find memory leaks!

I’m surprised TFA doesn’t mention `plutil` and its counterpart `PlistBuddy`. They’re like the `jq` of macOS.

https://scriptingosx.com/2016/11/editing-property-lists/

The say command has one of my favorite pieces of that famous Apple polish.

If you type `say os x`, it'll actually speak "oh es ten".

It says "oh es ex" for all variations I've tried

Capitalizing the phrase made it work for me

> say OS X

Edit: Late 2016 MBP on 12.6.6 Monterey

Interesting. Says 'OS 10" on my Ventura 13.4 macbook.

`tmutil` could be added to this list, it's a management cli for Time Machine

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.

It seems to grossly underestimate my upload bandwidth!

same

What are you, a station wagon full of thumb drives?

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).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDel

I can't find any (official) documentation on how it measures the speed. Against which target?

Edit: Found https://www.macinstruct.com/tutorials/how-to-check-your-macs... which says:

"The networkquality tool uses Apple’s CDN (https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/config) as a target"

The contents of this file (for me):

  { "version": 1,
    "test_endpoint": "sesto4-edge-bx-021.aaplimg.com",
    "urls": {
        "small_https_download_url": "https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/small",
        "large_https_download_url": "https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/large",
        "https_upload_url": "https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/slurp",
        "small_download_url": "https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/small",
        "large_download_url": "https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/large",
        "upload_url": "https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/slurp"
     }
  }

I find solace in the fact that even at large companies, there's still enough whimsy to name your upload endpoint slurp.

It’s a new proposed standard that’s gaining support. People are building alternative party implementations for it: https://github.com/network-quality/goresponsiveness

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.

There is also a CLI client for speedtest.net[1] and fast.com[2]! Not included with MacOS, of course, but nice to have around.

[1] https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli

[2] https://github.com/sindresorhus/fast-cli

I use:

``` #!/usr/bin/env bash

    set -u

    title=${2:-Shell}
    msg=$1

    osascript -e "display notification \"$1\" with title \"$title\""

```

As `~/bin/,notify` and put it at the end of long-running commands:

``` run_this_program && ,notify "Long program is done!" ```

I can’t help but ask, why “,notify” and not just “notify”?

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 is a very cool idea, I always hesitate to add a lot of aliases to my zshrc since I never want to step on any toes.

an upvote wasn't enough! this is cool, thanks for sharing.

CUPS tools are also awesome.

https://opensource.apple.com/source/cups/cups-450/cups/doc/h...

I find it extremely upsetting that `networkQuality` is the only command that is not entirely lowercase. How did this get through PR??

APFS isn't case-sensitive, so you can type networkquality if it makes you happy. :-)

Wow, truly a pro tip, thank you!

It can be, it’s just not by default.

Self-plug of displayplacer[0] for changing screen resolutions/rotations/etc via the command line.

[0] https://github.com/jakehilborn/displayplacer

Does this tool also allow me to change my iPad screen on Sidecar from landscape/horizontal into vertical?

It's not something that I've tried. There was a user report at the bottom of this GitHub issue that states sidecar rotation does not work.

https://github.com/jakehilborn/displayplacer/issues/17

I was hoping this would let me set 125% scaling on my 3440x1440 display but no, I guess it's a hard OS limitation. It's my biggest gripe with MacOS.

(There's BetterDisplay - formerly BetterDummy - but it introduces noticeable input lag for me.)

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.

`caffeinate` is a game changer. Now I can keep my Slack status green without sitting in an empty zoom room. #WFHLife ;)

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.

Amphetamine does the same thing, but with a task bar icon and better usability: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12

Or a full screen YouTube Mozart video that lasts for six hours

Not on the list, but I think `fs_usage` is an interesting one. Like a firehose of disk activity.

`pbcopy | jq | pbpaste` is a very frequent command that I run to quickly format json in the clipboard.

I use pbcopy and pbpaste probably all day long and always miss it in Linux environments.

You should Alias xsel if you’re in an x environment

Also `alias pbsort='pbpaste | sort | pbcopy'`

Slick! I need to figure out how to get something like this for SQL

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?"

wait caffeinate exists natively? ive been using a third party caffeine tool for the longest time..

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.

Now if only I could remember how to spell caffeinate.

I've only ever tab-completed it from caff.

Just make an alias to its other, easier to spell name `Methyltheobromine`. Simple.

I'm a 'trimethylxanthine' guy myself.

Yeah, I was thrilled when I discovered this for myself a few months ago! It's so useful in long-running scripts.

For a long time I used an app for this as well, but the app was just a thin wrapper around the CLI tool

after seeing the post i realized this is probably the case for most of us

i'm most surprised that they got this one by HN community

A couple of built-in I didn't see:

macOS software versions:

    sw_vers

macOS hardware overview:

    system_profiler SPHardwareDataType

Convert binary plist to xml

    plutil -convert xml1 -o out.xml in.plist

A couple of lesser known, but also handy ones to install:

    brew install dark-mode

    brew install duti

> screencapture - take screenshots

Big fan of screencapture. I wanted something similar but for capturing window videos, so I built https://github.com/xenodium/macosrec

I often wrap command line utilites with Emacs functions (don't need to remember invocation flags/structure but also enables batch invocations) https://xenodium.com/recordscreenshot-windows-the-lazy-way

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.

My LG Blu-Ray drive ignores its eject button if it's connected to a Mac, unless the drive is empty, so I use this, too.

pbcopy/pbpaste are a lifesaver when doing stuff on the command line that has a lot of output and piping is not something you can do.

networkQuality is something I really wish I knew about sooner.

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 :)

Ah, it's more for ~/.ssh/authorized_keys which is one key per line.

right (authorized_keys ignores blank lines and comments)

Fwiw, `clip` on Windows does the same as `pbcopy` (there's no analog to pbpaste built in though)

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.

`xed .` Is probably my most underrated macOS command. It will open Xcode using either your project or workspace file.

> open - open files and applications

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.

Is ```textutil -convert``` using pandoc under the hood?

IIRC it’s using the Cocoa class NSAttributedStrimg. These conversions have been in the OS for a long time.

I thought pandoc used to be installed on MacOS, I def remember using it for something useful a couple of years ago but I check now and it's not there.

I wrote this a while back to document managing WIFI connections using the command line.

https://www.mattcrampton.com/blog/managing_wifi_connections_...

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.

>I copied all of my ~/.bash_history into GPT

I wouldn't do that. I treat ChatGPT as public.

But it's a good list nevertheless

If you like `z`, you should check out my `tutu`.

https://github.com/daotoad/tutu

powermetrics gives a lot of energy usage info per CPU core and apps.

A lot of macOS behavior can be toggled by modifying the system component defaults.

For example, turn off autohiding of the Dock from commandline:

  defaults write com.apple.dock "autohide" -bool "false" && killall Dock

Include the date in screenshots you take:

  defaults write com.apple.screencapture "include-date" -bool "true"

Here is handy website which documents many of the defaults and their purpose: https://macos-defaults.com/#%F0%9F%99%8B-what-s-a-defaults-c...

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

Pretty cool tool it looks like. Gonna try using this. Also has good resources in the README.

I just freaked out my cat using `say`. I'm going to enjoy this too much.

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.

Combined with the `yes` command is very good fun ;)

YEARS ago, when my nephew was young, he was playing with my mother's Macbook Air at Thanksgiving.

I administer that machine for her (to the extent that such a thing is needed), and so I knew (a) her login and (b) that SSH was open.

Me combining remote access with "say" made for a very memorable morning for that kid.

try it out with different voices, for starters try

  say "process failure" -v trinoids

you can find all the available voices with

  say -v '?'

or from Accessibility>Spoken-Content>System-voice>Manage-voices

I liked the option of using `-v organ`

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.

We must rejoice in this morbid voice.

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?

Anyone know of a Ubuntu on WSL equivalent?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/awake to keep Windows itself awake?

Hoping for something in WSL land.

`vmIdleTimeout` in .wslconfig might be an option? Win 11 only though

apt install caffeine

I believe that Caffeine was a fairly simple GUI wrapper for the existing caffeinate command

Yes. There is a similar product called Amphetamine now.

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).

It's been cli util on macos for 10+ years. I remember a gui util called caffeinated, though.

Caffeine was a front-end by a third party company. Used it back in the day, the command existed already though.

Since then I've moved to Amphetamine (same purpose menu-bar app, even stronger chemicals, has timed keep-awake etc).

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:

    afconvert -v -s 3 -f m4bf meditation1.mp3

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.

Why?

with sleep comes "unlock screen" ;)

Ouch! Thanks!

Caffeinate with -u and then lock your screen. (Apple menu -> lock screen)

It'll stay connected/running/screen-on/etc but it's still locked.

You can lock the screen while caffeinated though.

Automatic screensaver enable after a period of inactivity is considered a fail safe control.

`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.

It’s not about capabilities, it’s about policy. Willfully violating security policies is generally going to go over poorly.

I thought that was its primary use case these days

My latest discovery is being able to manage Xcode simulators from the command line [1].

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/installing-a...

You can use `say` to recreate your own Serial Experiments Lain intros.

  say -v Whisper "Weird: Layer zero one"

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.

You can install additional voices in System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → System voice → Manage voices (in Ventura).

"Whisper" is listed under "English (US) - Novelty".

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.

I love pbcopy and miss it every time I ssh into my Raspberry Pi. Should be included in every shell environment as standard.

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?

[1]: https://git.zx2c4.com/password-store/tree/src/password-store...

[2]: https://ostechnix.com/how-to-use-pbcopy-and-pbpaste-commands...

In the best HN tradition, the list in the article is good, but the comments section is where the gold nuggets are.

I was aware of about half of these but textutil, networkUtility, and sips I didn’t not and look really interesting

Yeah, sips has a lot of potential. The article doesn't mention it, but it can crop as well which could be a real game-changer!

We heavily used `sips` when I was at Apple, because it was quicker than writing code against QuickTime or the other rendering subsystems.

It's rare to see a "you might not know about" instead of "you never thought about" etc.

Here are my favorites:

    alias sleepoff="sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1"

    alias sleepon="sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0"

This fully disables sleep, period. Just make sure you don't leave it unplugged too long, but on Apple Silicon it lasts for quite a long time.

this is just a worse version of caffeinate which is more likely to leave you with a dead battery.

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 typically use https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/workflow-re...

You can even do bulk cmds with cli on images:

  for x in ls *.webp; do  ffmpeg -i $x ${x%.webp}.png; done

reformats images from webp to png in a directory.

  magick mogrify -monitor -format jpg *.png -compress 70

reformats and compresses pngs to be jpg in a directory

You can use ImageMagick's `convert`.

  convert original.jpg -define jpeg:extent=2MB output.jpg

The result will be around 2MB in size (in both directions).

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.

Great list. Didn't know about pbcopy/pbpaste, very useful.

I use open regularly. Often to open a directory in finder and preview a file. Looks like I can just use qlmanage from now on.

Not sure I'd use screencapture manually, but I'm sure there are some automations that could benefit from this.

I suspect, like me, a lot of people have learned about pbcopy/pbpaste from the Github docs for adding a new SSH key to your account https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...

There is an even longer and useful list on https://git.herrbischoff.com/awesome-macos-command-line/abou...

“say” with my laptop connected to my home bluetooth speakers is a lot of fun with my kids.

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 not a shell utility, it should work with any shell.

  $ which networkQuality
  /usr/bin/networkQuality

Yes thanks- probably an issue with my $PATH

I recently discovered snippet-management tools, which I didn't know I needed. I'm trying Maccy and Paste. Curious which ones others love.

Oh, the `say` command is really damn useful to know about!

I didn’t know about textutil before, I’ll have to try that. Does that use the same backend as pages for word documents? How good is the conversion?

Caffienate will save my ass going forward. I don't know how many times I end up being the person that runs some batch job on my system...

Here’s a nice GUI wrapper: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704 (the name might be off-putting to some though)

say - text-to-speech engine:

I would have expected that at the era of AI this would sound a bit better than the Commodore 64 speech synthesis from 80s.

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.

What it really needs is a way to prevent sleeping when the lid is closed (only) during a system update.

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.

Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options...

Three-Finger Drag works really well and is surprisingly easy to get used to doing.

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'.

mx, aliased to 'dig \!\* mx | grep -v "^;..*" | grep "IN\WMX"'

Same, but for MX records (I maintain e-mail servers, hence these two).

est, aliased to 'netstat -n | grep -i proto ; netstat -n | grep ESTABLISHED | grep -v 127.0.0.1'

List all currently open network connections.

listen, aliased to 'sudo echo -n; sudo lsof -i4 -n -P | grep "\*:" | sed "s/IPv4.*://" | grep LISTEN | sort -n --key=5 | sed "s/ (LISTEN)//" | awk BEGIN\ \{print\ \"COMMAND\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ PID\ \ \ \ \ \ \ USER\ \ \ \ \ \ \ PORT\"\}\ \{printf\ \"%-10s\ %10s\ %10s\ %10s\\n\"\,\ \$1\,\ \$2\,\ \$3\,\ \$5\}'

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.

opensnoop is also a good one that usually stays under the radar

Someone should turn this HN discussion into a gist.

here's my notes from reading the comments: https://notes.billmill.org/computer_usage/mac_os/mac_os_comm...

`mdfind` and `networkQuality` seem very useful!

I never knew sips was a thing, cool!

Most people would rather criticize than actually look for goodness.

Super cool.

pbcopy and pbpaste are soooo helpful

json_pp

Wow! So cool! Thanks!

pandoc is the definitive document converter.

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're shipping zsh now.

I've found the transition to zsh surprisingly painless. But then, I do most of my command line scripting on linux and not my own machine. But still.

macOS has shipped Zsh for a long time. The difference is that now (since Catalina), it’s the default shell.

That's why I said "if you use 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)

Obviously everything is preference, but I prefer things like expanded regex in gnu grep to the underpowered macOS utils

GNU and BSD grep both default to "basic" regular expressions and both have the `-E` switch to use "extended" expressions.

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)

It's not necessary to install a suite of commands if you want updated grep.

Just use Homebrew and you can install different versions of grep, including GNU's:

    brew install grep

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

Some of us don't want all of GNU's utilities; just on an as-needed basis. They're not as needed as they once were.

Many of these utilities have been rewritten in Rust and have more modern features and are faster.

For example, instead of ls, I use exa [1]. Or ripgrep [2] instead of grep. sd [3] instead of sed.

[1]: https://github.com/ogham/exa

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

[3]: https://github.com/chmln/sd

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.

Not a big fan of command lines. but my most used shortkey is ALT+M with Maccy installed.

What does that do?

Maccy ( https://maccy.app/ ) is a clipboard manager for Mac and by Clicking ALT+M , it shows all the recent copied texts in a popup.

Is that Option-M?

I use external logitech keyboard, where it's Alt+M but yes, it's actually Command+M on Macbook

Aha! They make Logitech keyboards with Macintosh keys now btw.

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