Bossman: tmux-backed shell for your OS X menu bar | Hacker News Reader

Bossman: tmux-backed shell for your OS X menu bar

github.com

44 pointsics12 comments

Just to note: it's my first cocoa/objc project, lacks features, but is simple and convenient enough to be used right away.

The readme really doesn't give a good indication of what it is. A screenshot in the markdown might go a long way depending on what it actually does.

I mean it sounds like it overloads every single menu bar command for whatever application you are running, but that doesn't make much sense. Alternatively it could be an app that has a menu bar with say File/Send Command that you click and something pops up, but that seems silly. Why would I launch that app when I could just launch a terminal and connect to tmux.... Or maybe it is one of those non-hardware icons that sit in the hardware section of the menu bar running all of the time?

I guess the real question is why wouldn't I just use the terminal to type?

"Alternatively it could be an app that has a menu bar with say File/Send Command that you click and something pops up, but that seems silly."

Bingo! It just sits in the menubar so you can run things, and the hotkey is there for you to do anything you want with. Set it to pop open a window and attach, announce "your task is complete", or whatever. Simple, boring, silly, etc. Just for those times when a terminal window would get in your way because you're working on something else. That being said, there are plenty of interesting features that could be added to make the idea more compelling.

Edit: my noprocrast is about to kick in and I think I'll honor it... so thanks for taking a look, hope I didn't waste anyone's time.

That readme has to have more explanation. Upload some screenshots of it in action or a video link to youtube showing a screencast of how you use it. It might be the best thing since sliced bread but we don't know what it is from the description.

Is this more like TotalTerminal or dmenu?

What's up with this path? https://github.com/ianclarksmith/Bossman/tree/master/Bossman...

It's a symlink to itself, which github isn't doing a great job of handling.

Kinda wanna know what this app actually does. A screenshot would be helpful.

Yeah sorry, I'll get to it when I'm back on my laptop. On top of that I made a ridiculously stupid typo before committing so anyone who downloaded it is probably really wondering wtf right now (so if you want to try it, please redownload the release or rebuild from git: https://github.com/ianclarksmith/Bossman/releases/tag/0.0.1).

- Open the app

- Alt-click the status icon and peek at the prefs

- (Optional) If you use Terminal, set Command-Enter to

    osascript /full/path/to/Bossman.app/Contents/Resources/Attach in Terminal.scpt

- Type a command and press enter. Type another command and press command+enter. You've seen the whole thing.

- Everything in a tmux-session called (by default) "bossman-app" so you don't lose history, can check up on things, etc.

would love a better explanation of this, I can't really tell what this is even after reading the read me.

All it does is send your command from a text field to a running tmux session. If you want to `brew update` without getting in the way of Netflix on your little laptop screen, it will do that. If you need to check up on it, just connect to the session from another terminal (or use one of the provided scripts so you can attach to it via the hotkey).

For another comment on how to use it, see below in reply to caiob.

What would be an example of what I'd use this for? Also it would be nice if I could send interrupts.

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