Author: ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author

Copy all Safari tabs to Notes.app

I had previously posted about one of my oldest but still frequently used scripts which gathers all tabs from a window into a text list to be pasted in an email or something like that.

I have recently adapted that script to do something new. This new script will gather the tabs in the frontmost Safari window and create a note in the Notes app with all the links (then, presumably, you would want to clean out and close most of the tabs)

Also I learned that the Safari tabs from all your Macs and iOS devices are stored in the `~/Library/SyncedPreferences/com.apple.Safari.plist` and extended the script to read that instead of grabbing them directly from Safari:

To use it is probably easiest to enable the Script menu (in Script Editor > Preferences) and drop the scripts in the `~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari` folder.

MacID adds Scripting Support

MacID is a very useful application which automatically locks a Mac when a paired iOS device moves out of range. It will also offer to unlock the Mac using Touch ID on the device, but I use that part less than I would expect. (You can also unlock with Apple Watch, which is cool.)
The latest update adds scripting support:

You can now extend MacID by dropping AppleScript text files (they MUST be exported as text files) into onSleep, onLock, onWake, onUnlock directories in ~/Application Support/MacID/. MacID will execute these scripts at the respective event. For example, you could pause iTunes when your Mac locks, and resume playing when your Mac unlocks.

To try this, I created a simple AppleScript

tell application "iTunes"
  pause
end tell

and saved it as a text AppleScript document in the onUnlock folder. Works as expected!

Typefaces for Terminal and text editing

Many users on Twitter pointed out a new typeface designed for terminals and text editors called Hack. It looks nice but I thought I’d make a list of other useful open source typefaces:

  • Source Code Pro from Adobe is designed for code editing. This is my favorite and I have set it in Terminal and BBEdit. It has many different weights, italics, and also related typefaces Source Sans Pro and Source Serif Pro in case you want proportional typefaces as well. These are regularly updated with minor improvements and new glyphs.

  • Courier Prime is an improvement on the standard Courier typeface. There are also sans serif and code versions available.

  • Hack is the new typeface which inspired this post. The characters seem much larger than similar fonts at the same point size, but according to the page that is intentional.

Hack will be nice to have around, but for now Source Code Pro remains my favorite.

(If you, like me, are curious when to use ‘typeface’ vs ‘font’ then read this helpful article.)

Mount a dmg off a web server

I saw this project by Douglas Nerad which stream lines the bootstrapping installation of Munki, so that you can do it while booted from the Recovery partition. This is useful to inject munkitools on a new Mac without having to go through setting up a user.

The read me recommends to put the script and other resources on a USB key, which works fine, as long you have only one USB key. If you have to share this tool among multiple admins keeping the keys up to date (and in your pocket) can be a pain.

If you put all the resources and the script in an dmg file on a web server, you can run

hdiutil attach http://webserver/path/to/InstallThis.dmg

and then run scripts and installer pkgs from the attached volume.

installer -pkg /Volumes/InstallThis/munkitools2-latest.pkg
/Volumes/InstallThis/setupEverything.sh

Note that you cannot run python scripts from the Recovery partition. It is best to use shell or bash scripts.

Using ShellCheck with BBEdit

Several people I follow in Twitter have pointed a quite useful looking tools called ShellCheck. It will scan shell script code for common problems that may lead to errors later, especially quoting.

However, the script is written in Haskell, which brings with it a rat’s tail of dependencies if you want to install it on your own Mac.

Since I did not want to bother with that I wrote a script that will grab the code from the frontmost BBEdit window and paste it into the webpage:

Drop this in your BBEdit Scripts folder and enjoy!

Check Python Syntax in BBEdit with flake8

There are existing scripts out there that will run flake8 against a python file in BBEdit, but none of them worked quite the way I wanted. So here is mine:

Before you can run this, you need to install flake with sudo easy_install flake8. Then you need to drop this script in ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Scripts. You can launch it from the menu with the script icon.