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Tell HN: Best OS X Utility for programmers who use the command line
I don't know how I have lived without it for so long: http://www.decimus.net/dterm.php
Fast access to the shell that defaults to the working directory of the currently used file from say xcode and you can paste in the current working file(s) as arguments to whatever you want to run. There is an option to run the command in the overlay app or in terminal.
I recently found out about it because I was looking for xcode git integration and this makes accessing the shell git stuff quick. It's free too.
- weaksauce 17y agoClickable: http://www.decimus.net/dterm.php http://www.decimus.net/dterm.php
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mgrouchy 17y agopretty cool, a tool I have been using for quite some time that I find incredible useful is http://visor.binaryage.com/ http://visor.binaryage.com/ . Not quite the same thing, but still awesome.
- weaksauce 17y agoI like that tool too. I could see them being complementary.
- tvon 17y agoHuge visor fan, couldn't live without it. I have a fullscreen terminal a control-tilde away at all times.
- woid 17y agohey I'm also working on TotalFinder. in 0.9 I plan to add Terminal+Finder cooperation mode: when you press hotkey you may slide both Visor Terminal down and Visor Finder Up. You may tab between terminal and finder as it would be one app and their views will stay synced. You get the idea ...
- joeyo 17y agoThanks for that link! I hadn't realized the source had forked away from the Blacktree original and now I find I am running a rather old version of visor.
- canadaduane 17y agoI use LaunchBar more than I use the Dock: http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
- moe 17y agoThat's really awesome, thanks for the link. One of my best finds so far would be butler: http://www.petermaurer.de/butler/ http://www.petermaurer.de/butler/ It's basically quicksilver but with less obscure configuration dialogs and without the crashes (quicksilver would crash a lot on me).
- dhess 17y agoIs Butler being maintained? Is there a bug tracker? It doesn't look like there's been a release since 2008, but I can't tell because I can't find a dated changelog for the project.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- vl 17y agoI use Butler to remap Home and End keys to have PC-like behavior. Can't live without it!
- nudded 17y agocommand + (left|right) arrow would do the same on a mac.
- vl 17y agoThis is exactly what Home and End are remapped to.
- ube 17y agoDoes your mapping work well across most/all applications? I've tried mapping via keybindings file and messed up my account (this is snowlepord)
- vl 17y agoI had to exclude iTerm (you can exclude apps in Butler), everything else (Firefox, Eclipse, Parallels, TextWrangler, Thunderbird) works fine. Obviously, Shift-Home and Shift-End should be remapped as well so selection would work.
- Dobbs 17y agoI have to say this tool made me consider getting a mac for a second. Still wont but it has done more good for the argument than any other I've sen before.
- dasil003 17y agoInteresting. What sold me on OS X almost 10 years ago now was the simple combination of a first-class UNIX OS w/ support for the major consumer and professional creative apps.
- weaksauce 17y agoI must say that the biggest selling point on the mac to me was that it had a POSIX shell readily available and I didn't need "putty" to do anything interesting. I have been and still am responsible for many windows boxes but I cannot stand it for my main machine. I really love the fact that all the power of UNIX is hidden behind a nice GUI(though there are some things that I would like them to fix regarding finder)
- andrewtj 17y agoI'm going to be slightly flippant and say the the bundled tools and little one liners built with them. A few examples from my .profile follow: Eject a volume: alias eject='hdiutil eject' Copy the working dir to the clipboard: alias cpwd='pwd|xargs echo -n|pbcopy' Show current airport status: apinfo='/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I' Use spotlight to search for a file: spotlightfile() { mdfind "kMDItemDisplayName == '$@'wc"; } Use spotlight to search file contents: spotlightcontent() { mdfind -interpret "$@"; } Display a man page in Preview: pdfman () { man -t $1 | open -a /Applications/Preview.app -f } I've a few others but they're less generic than the above. Also although the above were sitting in my .profile I probably yanked them from random parts of the inter-webs; in other words, I take no credit for them. EDIT: One more generic one I use fairly regularly: google() { python -c "import sys, webbrowser, urllib; webbrowser.open('http://www.google.com/search?' + urllib.urlencode({'q': ' '.join(sys.argv[1:]) }))" $@ }
- weaksauce 17y agoThat's not really flippant as those are useful by themselves. All the utility I am advocating does it make the oneliners a bit easier to get to and have context(i.e. changing the working directory to what you are actually working on) readily available. I would say that a programmer without a decent list of aliases saved up is not the best programmer.
- aschobel 17y agopbcopy is a great little utility another neat trick is dragging and dropping a file to the terminal and having the filename pasted to the terminal
- aeontech 17y agoI use quicksilver [http://github.com/andreberg/blacktree-alchemy/downloads http://github.com/andreberg/blacktree-alchemy/downloads], more than anything else. (still like it better than launchbar, even with it being not updated in a few years).
- phren0logy 17y agohttp://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14831/quicksilver http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14831/quicksilver The "stealth" release of QuickSilver beta 57, from November 2009. It's not perfect, but it crashes far less than other builds in 10.6.2 (for me at least). I have no idea why it's not on the blacktree site.
- junklight 17y agoI'd given up on QS and gone to google search box (or whatever it was called) - I happily am back on QS with this stealth release - much faster and don't remember the last time it crashed
- weaksauce 17y agoI am a quicksilver user too. Though the index updating seemed to beachball my computer on the regular. After changing the prefs to only update once a day they have gone away.
- ctcherry 17y agoI used to be a quicksilver user, I now use this http://www.google.com/quicksearchbox/ http://www.google.com/quicksearchbox/ basically the same idea.
- po 17y agoNot really a command line utility, but rather a programming utility used through the command line: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew I've replaced my MacPorts install with Homebrew and have been pretty happy with it. It's relatively new so not everything is in there yet.
- dasil003 17y agoI'm just waiting to get a new MBP to setup everything via homebrew. Building myself vs choosing MacPorts has never been an easy choice. Inevitably over the years the choice one way or another has caused me a lot of pain. Homebrew seems to be the best of both worlds, and allows you to confine everything to your home directory which is a nice bonus in my case. My only fear with homebrew is the lack of robust dependency resolution, but in practice I tend to be installing a limited set of devtools, so it doesn't rise to the same dependency hell that gave rise to the modern crop of unix package managers.
- jperras 17y agoI feel like this is a common argument against homebrew, but have yet to encounter a situation where this was actually an issue.
- PatrickTulskie 17y agoI've found that the dependancy resolution is pretty decent. Heck, it can install ImageMagick just fine.
- KC8ZKF 17y agoThere is something written on the linked page that has always bothered me: "Using sudo all the time is annoying, but far worse — it conditions you to type in your root password without thinking about it." That quote implies a misunderstanding of sudo, and has made me less confident about installing Homebrew. Unix permissions and installation procedures should be well understood by a developer of package management software. It's probably good software, for all that. He probably understands Unix better than I do, but it still bothers me.
- Groxx 17y agodterm, eh? That looks awesome... gotta give it a try now.
- sabat 17y agoAwesome. I can't believe I lived without this.
- fragmede 17y agoSlightly different and finder only: http://code.google.com/p/cdto/ http://code.google.com/p/cdto/ 'Open a terminal window here'
- wrinklz 17y agoOnMyCommand is a UNIX shell script and AppleScript executor. You can build your own Contextual Menu Item or GUI application. Sweet. http://free.abracode.com/cmworkshop/on_my_command.html http://free.abracode.com/cmworkshop/on_my_command.html
- icodestuff 17y agoThat solves one half of the terminal/GUI interaction disconnect, but I'd really like something to do the opposite too... keep a Finder window synced to my current working directory, preferably that floats above everything else* . Why? There's a few things that you can't do with a Terminal, such as seeing and easily editing all the info from Get Info at once, or most things involving the use of a contextual menu - especially seeing what programs are in the Open With list (there may be a launch services related command, but you still can't pick one without typing another command (open -a Application file). Multi-file drag and drop is easier than multi-file cp, especially if you don't need a particularly named group of files that you can use a wildcard with - it's easier to shift-click or command-click than to type each one out individually, even if you can use tab completion. * aliasing cd to end with an open . won't do, because that brings Finder to the front (which you can work around in bash), along with all the other open Finder windows (which you can't), and worse, it opens a new window every time instead of reusing the same one (another can't work around). The last two are because you can't, as far as I know, get a handle on a particular Finder window. I wonder if an AppleScript can get the job done. Hmm...
- alagu 17y agoNot really a commandline tool, but when I am writing code or on terminal I heavily use MegaZoomer - http://osx.iusethis.com/app/megazoomer http://osx.iusethis.com/app/megazoomer Gives total real estate for the terminal (works in other apps too) DTerm is a great tool.
- godDLL 17y agoDTerm is awesome, and since it went free there is no reason not to try it out even if you're a Quicksilver/LaunchBar user – you probably will find it serves you better in many scenarios. And here's a nice tidbit – TextMate comes with `mate`, a proxy utility you can call with DTerm like so: `mate ./new_file_here`. But XCode doesn't, and won't create a file for you if one doesn't exist. So for XCode I have an function/proxy in my `~/.profile`: function edit { touch "$1"; open -a Xcode "$1"; } Bash can be very usefully augmented, for instance you can have a git repo status in your prompt, like so: function wgit_dirty { git diff --quiet HEAD &>/dev/null [[ $? == 1 ]] && echo "◆" } function wgit_branch { REF=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return echo :${REF#refs/heads/}$(wgit_dirty) } export PS1='\u \W$(wgit_branch)\$ '
- stevelosh 17y agoRupa's 'z' makes working in a command line so much nicer: http://github.com/rupa/z http://github.com/rupa/z
- oldbrownshoe08 17y agoSemi command line, icalBuddy + GeekTool for displaying calendar items and to do's on the desktop is awesome. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-show-ical-tasks-events-on-the-desktop-mac-only/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-show-ical-tasks-events-o...