MacOS – How to flash screen from command line

accessibilityautomationcommand linemacos

Is there a way to flash the screen from the command line? I am looking for the same effect that Accessibility does for "Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs", but I don't want it for every alert.

Best Answer

As far as I know, you can't replicate this alert without enabling that option. If you do enable that option, you can cause a flash from Terminal using:

osascript -e "beep"

However, if you don't want to enable that option, you can use invert colours. Using the invert colours Accessibility option twice causes the screen to flash, therefore pressing the keyboard shortcut ⌃⌥⌘8 twice will cause a flash:

#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "System Events" to repeat 2 times
key code 28 using {command down, control down, option down}
delay 0
end repeat
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