Open two applications in full spit screen using Bash script

applescriptbashsplit viewterminal

I am trying to write a Bash script to open two applications in full split screen, for example:

#!/bin/bash

LESSON="$1"

echo operating on lesson $LESSON

open /Applications/Pages.app /Users/username/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~Pages/Documents/$LESSON*
open /Users/username/courses/chemistry/$LESSON*

This works, but I want to open Pages and Preview in full screen and split view.

Best Answer

Get the Magnet app from the App Store, far less effort and does exactly what you want.

Related Solutions

MacOS – AppleScript vs. Bash script

Both shell- and AppleScripts can be used just about anywhere either is appropriate.

AppleScripts work better when talking to apps and user-level system facilities. (For instance, you can say tell app "iTunes" to play and it will, or tell app "Finder" to open the first file of the second window.)

Shell scripts (you referred to bash) work better when talking to low-level system objects and Unixy stuff.

They're both interoperable: you can call a shell command from AppleScript with do shell script "command here" and you can call AppleScript code from the shell with osascript -e "AppleScript". Further, there's quite a bit of overlap between the two (especially when it comes to file system operations).

There are certainly more resources for learning shell scripting online than AppleScript and it doesn't help that AppleScript has a reputation for being a "read-only" language (i.e., harder to write than read).

In any case, the most modern way to do scripting is with Automator, where you can use either shell- or AppleScripting (or both) along with pre-built modules from various apps you have installed.

MacOS – Run AppleScript from bash script

The argument for osascript -e can contain newlines:

osascript -e 'set x to "a"
say x'

You can also specify multiple -e arguments:

osascript -e 'set x to "a"' -e 'say x'

Or if you use a heredoc, bash interprets three characters (\, $, and `) between <<END and END but no characters between <<'END' and END.

osascript <<'END'
set x to "a"
say x
END

Edit:

Since osascript can operate with a heredoc (ie take input from /dev/stdin) then one can just write the script as a whole file and prepend with the correct shebang line:

#!/usr/bin/env osascript

set x to "a"
say x

This also allows you to save your apple script as a actual program in ~/Applications/.app using the following procedure (changing for your script's name):

mkdir -p ~/Applications/<APP_NAME>.app/Contents/MacOS
touch ~/Applications/<APP_NAME>.app/Contents/MacOS/<APP_NAME>
open -A TextEdit ~/Applications/<APP_NAME>.app/Contents/MacOS/<APP_NAME>

Ensure that both the script file in .../MacOS/ and the matches

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – AppleScript vs. Bash script

MacOS – Run AppleScript from bash script

Related Question