MacOS – Launch terminal in new window by default

Here's what happened. On the machines I was trying to reach (10.x.y.182 and 10.x.y.194), in the time when I was not using them they had their hard disks replaced and the OS reinstalled. This gave them new SSH keys, invalidating the ones I had in my ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Unfortunately, Terminal.app did not surface this problem to me.

By deleting the entries for those machines in ~/.ssh/known_hosts, I forced the system to pull down the new keys and ask me if I wanted to use them. With this done, connections worked perfectly as usual. Oddly, however, even before I changed ~/.ssh/known_hosts, connections using the DNS name of the machine (svr10 and svr20) worked. Weird.

Thanks, everyone, who looked at this problem.

Windows of applications aren't normally called instances on OS X. You can open new instances with open -n, but there's no way to do that from the UI. Applications with multiple instances also have multiple Dock icons.

If you actually meant that, you could add an action for it in Alfred:

There's no standard way to open a new window with open or AppleScript though. You'd have to use different terminology for each application.

on alfred_script(q)
    tell application (q as text)
        activate
        if number of windows is 0 then
            reopen
        else
            if name is "TextEdit" then
                tell application "TextEdit" to make new document
            else if name is "Finder" then
                tell application "Finder" to make new Finder window
            else if name is "Safari" then
                tell application "Safari" to make new document at beginning with properties {URL:"about:blank"}
            end if
        end if
    end tell
end alfred_script