Open Source Objective C Command Line Tools

Platypus is a developer tool that creates native Mac applications from command line scripts such as shell scripts or Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, JavaScript, and PHP programs. This is done by wrapping the script in an application bundle along with a slim app binary that runs the script. Platypus makes it easy to share scripts and programs with people who are unfamiliar with the command line interface. Native, user-friendly applications can be created with a few clicks. It is very easy to create installers, droplets, administrative applications, login items, status menu items, launchers, and automation using Platypus.

Sloth is a native Mac app that shows all open files and sockets in use by all running processes on your system. This makes it easy to inspect which apps are using which files and sockets. View all open files, directories, IP sockets, devices, Unix domain sockets and pipes. Filter by name, access mode, volume, type, location, or using regular expressions. Sort by name, process ID, user ID, process type, bundle identifier, etc. Sloth is essentially a friendly, exploratory GUI built on top of the lsof command line tool. The output is parsed and shown in a searchable, filterable outline view with all sorts of convenient additional functionality. Sloth is free, open source software and now has a home on GitHub. It has been continuously developed and maintained for a very long time (since 2004). Inspection window with detailed macOS and Unix file/socket/process info.

cliclick (short for “Command Line Interface Click”) is a tool for executing mouse- and keyboard-related actions from the shell/Terminal. It is written in Objective-C and runs on macOS 10.15 or later.

KeepingYouAwake is a small menu bar utility for macOS (Version 10.12 and newer) that can prevent your Mac from entering sleep mode for a predefined duration or as long as it is activated. The app is a small wrapper around Apple's caffeinate command line utility. All current versions of macOS ship with this tool by default. On a MacBook this only works as long as the lid is open. This utility will not harm your Mac because it is based on an official command line tool by Apple. Version 1.5.2 is the latest release that supports macOS Yosemite and El Capitan. KeepingYouAwake uses Sparkle's ui-separation-and-xpc branch to deliver updates. You can build and sign Sparkle with make Vendor. To build a release version of the app just run make dist.

terminal-notifier is a command-line tool to send macOS User Notifications, which are available on macOS 10.10 and higher. alerter features were merged in terminal-notifier 1.7. This led to some issues and even more issues in the 1.8 release. From now on terminal-notifier won't have the sticky notification feature nor the actions buttons. If you need them please use alerter. Sticking to two smaller specialized tools will hopefully make them easier to maintain and less error prone. It is currently packaged as an application bundle, because NSUserNotification does not work from a ‘Foundation tool’. radar://11956694. If you intend to package terminal-notifier with your app to distribute it on the Mac App Store, please use 1.5.2; version 1.6.0+ uses a private method override, which is not allowed in the App Store Guidelines.

Image Tapestry is a command-line tool that concatenate multiple images to a single image.

A simple OS X command-line tool for setting network location, plus a GUI wrapper application

Polyglot is a command-line tool written in Obj-C/Cocoa for use on Mac OS X. It is designed to smooth the process of localizing Cocoa applications to other languages, by providing checks and optimizations that it can apply to other Cocoa applications.

appledoc is command line tool that helps Objective-C developers generate Apple-like source code documentation from specially formatted source code comments. It's designed to take as readable source code comments as possible for the input and use comments as well as surrounding source code to generate visually appealing documentation in the form of HTML as well as fully indexed and browsable Xcode documentation set. Additionally, you can of course use documentation generated by appledoc for your products (free or commercial), but you must attribute appledoc either in the documentation itself or another appropriate place such as your website.

blueutil is a command-line utility for managing Bluetooth on macOS. It provides control over Bluetooth connections, device pairing, and power state from the terminal.

A collection of tools and scripts for processing images and video from attached USB and FireWire webcams on Mac OS X. To start things off, there is a command-line tool for capturing webcam images.