macOS
macOS is the OS I use on a day-to-day basis, and both my personal and work computers are Macs.
15 articles
Going between Finder and the Terminal
A few shell scripts I use to go between the Finder and the Terminal.
Changing the macOS accent colour without System Preferences
Updating the accent colour everywhere, with immediate effect, using a script written in Swift.
Closing lots of Safari tabs with JXA
To help me keep my tab count down, I wrote a JXA script to close tabs that can easily be recreated.
A tale of two path separators
macOS allows both the slash and colon as path separators, and this caused me no small amount of confusion.
Programatically finding the original filename of a photo in the macOS Photos Library
If you’re looking at a UUID’d file in the PhotosLibrary package, how do you find its original filename?
How to ignore lots of folders in Spotlight
A script that allows me to ignore folders like “target” and “node_modules”, so they don’t appear in search results.
Using AppleScript to detect if a Safari window uses Private Browsing
Finding the app/process that’s using Secure Input
A Python script that shows me the name of processes that have Secure Input enabled.
Using qlmanage to create thumbnails on macOS
How you can invoke Quick Look on the command-line to generate high-quality thumbnails.
Getting a Markdown link to a window in Safari
Changing the accent colour of ICNS icons
Playing with macOS ICNS image files to create colourful new icons.
Using AppleScript to open a URL in Private Browsing in Safari
Finding the latest screenshot in macOS Mojave
Clearing disk space on OS X
A few tools and utilities I’ve been using to help clear disk space on my Mac.
Export a list of URLs from Safari Reading List
A Python script for getting a list of URLs from Safari Reading List.
10 notes
AirPlay Receiver can interfere with Flask apps
It listens on port 5000, which is the default port used for running Flask apps in debug mode, then Safari sends blank pages for my Flask app.
Don’t show Dock icons from apps on another device
The name of this feature is “Handoff”, and that’s where you’ll find the setting for it.
How to run a task on a schedule on macOS
Create a
LaunchAgentwith aStartCalendarIntervalorStartIntervalthat defines how often you want the task to run.Where does AirDrop save files on macOS?
Look in
/private/tmp.Editing a filename in Finder will convert it to NFD
Even if the filename looks the same, it may be invisibly converted to a different sequence of bytes.
How can I work out what program is keeping a disk open?
Use
sudo lsofand grep for the name of the disk you’re trying to eject.How to find all of Apple’s system icons
You need to look for files named
*.icnsinside any subdirectory ofCoreTypes.bundle.How to get the selected item in Finder using AppleScript
Exclude files from Time Machine with
tmutil addexclusionRun a script on macOS on a schedule using a LaunchAgent