Tech Reflect

This question comes up often on Swift mailing lists. Once you learn Swift, you’ll get addicted and want to use it everywhere. It’s not quite as straightforward writing a script in Swift as it is in python or bash. However, there are lots of benefits.

• It’s a great entry point into learning Swift for those that typically write scripts rather than applications
• You want to execute a bunch of shell commands, but you can use Swift’s rich data structures, straightforward programming language, and the huge Cocoa API.

Here’s what you can do:

• Launch Xcode
• File > New > ProjectChoose macOS
• Click on Command Line Tool
• Name it and save the project

• Click on main.swift in the sidebar
• Replace the Hello, World line with this code.

import Foundation

struct Shell {
     func stripWhitespace(_ inString: String) -> String {
         return inString.trimmingCharacters(in: CharacterSet.whitespacesAndNewlines)
     }

     func executeCommand(_ command:String, echo: Bool = true) -> 

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Marks are a little used feature in Terminal but can be insanely useful depending on how you use Terminal. I’ll explain by example.

Copying the output of a command

The usual way:

• Start with a Terminal window where you’ve run a number of commands already
• Run a Terminal command that spews a lot of output
• Decide you want to move the output into a bug report or email
• Hunt in the Terminal window for where you typed the command and manually drag or shift-select to get just the output of the command.

Alternative using Marks:

Hit Command-Shift-A and it selects all the output of the most recent command.

Navigate between commands

The usual way:

• Run a series of Terminal commands that spew a lot of output
• Decide you want to navigate between the various commands along with their output
• Scroll around and use prompt color or some other means to

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When editing a document in Terminal, whether it be vi or emacs or your-favorite-text-editor, you can use keyboard commands to move the cursor around.

But unless you’re an expert, the commands can be hard-to-remember and tedious. It’s also not very Mac-like. A little gem in Terminal is that you can option-click inside an editor to move your cursor to that position. In the screenshot below, my cursor was near the bottom of the view and I option-clicked right between “option-click” and “here” in the middle of the document.

Note that this works regardless of whether it’s in insert mode or not (using vi terminology). For example, when I’m in command mode in vi, I can option-click anywhere in any line and type “dd” to delete it.

A simple tip and perhaps obvious to some, but in my experience, I see people waste a lot of … READ THE REST