Languages: Bash, OSAScript

I’ve always wanted a simple notification CLI tool to poke me when a task is complete. There few tools out that that do this, the most impressive being Variadico’s Noti. That one is written in Golang using Cobra and supports basically every notification service you can think of – it’s well done in my opinion. But still, for my use case it was a bit much. I wanted something incredibly simple. It should do one job: tell me when something is done.

So I looked to bash and I’m on a Mac, which quickly lead me to find out that you can trigger a notification by calling Mac OSAScript directly from the terminal.

OSAScript is Apple’s scripting language for exectuing small little tasks on your local computer. It’s actually quite handy, comes with a GUI if you want, and give you access to a bunch of things such as notifications, volume, opening finder, etc..

Here’s the most simple way to execute a notifcation from the command line:

osascript -e 'display notification "World." with title "Hello"'

Swap out notification for dialog and an ok/cancel modal will pop up. It’s that easy.

Let Me Know

So triggering a notification is easy. The rest was putting together a script that runs some code first, and then sends a notication. With that in mind Let Me Know was born.

Throw in a bit of error handling and voila this is the whole script:

notif(){
  title=$1
  shift
  script='display notification "'$*'" with title "'$title'"'
  osascript -e "$script"
}

$* && (notif "Complete" $*) || (notif "Error" $*)

Stupidly simple and does only what I needed. Check it out on github if you’re interested.