Sending notifications from Emacs (Mac OS X)

Sending notifications from emacs is something I find useful. In an earlier blog post I talked about how to use Growl to do so. http://justinsboringpage.blogspot.com/2009/09/making-emacs-growl.html

Well now you don't need Growl any longer. There's a neat github project called terminal notifier https://github.com/alloy/terminal-notifier which let's you send notifications from the terminal.

You can install it simply, via Homebrew or Rubygems as follows:

$ [sudo] gem install terminal-notifier

OR

brew install terminal-notifier

Then you can send notifications using a command like this:

terminal-notifier -message "hello"

Finally in order to send the notification from emacs we need to write a little Emacs lisp.

Check out this gist for the code I use:

https://gist.github.com/justinhj/eb2d354d06631076566f#file-gistfile1-el

This lets you send a notification in the future using M-x timed-notification

You are prompted for a time, and the format of that time can be given in a human readable way such as "2 seconds" or "5 minutes" (If you're curious for the allowed options look at the info page in emacs for the function timer-duration )

Then you are prompted for the message "Go to the store", and the message will be sent.

The code is very simple, it simply uses run-at-time to run the terminal command in the future. A useful command is find-executable, which given a name will find that executable in your path and run it. This makes configuring tools like this less effort.

Troubleshooting

Hey if it doesn't work first time what can you do?

1. Check if terminal notify is installed correctly by running at terminal
2. If that succeeds and you don't get a message check if you have enabled do not disturb mode
3. Otherwise if that succeeds and yet emacs isn't sending messages you likely don't have the executable on the path. M-x customize-variable exec-path

Watch

So this is pretty cool.

The watch command (available linux and on Mac via brew) will run a program every n seconds and display the results in a terminal.

For example, the following common will show the display above with human readable disk free space on your system. But since the command can be anything you want this is a pretty powerful tool.

watch -n 3 df -h

Programmer tips for Mac OSX

Some tips for programmers on the Mac.

emacs: the best place to get emacs for Mac seems to be here http://emacsformacosx.com/ which is also the most no nonsense website design ever

Not really a Mac tip, but I stick my .emacs configuration file in a Dropbox folder, along with any emacs libraries and emacs lisp code I write. Then where-ever I install emacs I make a simple .emacs that points to the one in the Dropbox folder. This also forces me to make sure any platform specific emacs stuff is properly handled.

Clipboard: copy and paste between the terminal and other apps can be done with pbcopy and pbpaste. For example a long complicated command line you want to email to yourself, just do:

echo "long complicated bash command line you don't want to retype" | pbcopy

And then you can Command-V that into your email window. Going the other way is just as simple; Command-C the text you want and pop it into the terminal window with pbpaste.

Open: If you want open an application from the command line you can do it like this:

open -a SomeApp /Users/yourname/SomeFile.hai

You can open a folder in finder

open /Folder/

or

open /Folder/SomeFile.hai

to open that file with it's default application.

Check out the help 'man open', to see other stuff like how you pipe stdout into an application.

Finally check out this guys OpenTerminalHere script. This pops an icon in finder that lets you open a terminal window in the highlighted folder.

http://www.entropy.ch/software/applescript/