An alias is a tiny file that automatically opens the file that it represents. Although an alias is technically an icon, it’s actually an icon that opens another icon automatically. You can put aliases in convenient places, such as on the Desktop, to help you easily open programs and files that you access often.
Jan 27, 2020 Head to your Desktop folder, then right-click and press New Folder to create a new folder. Give this a name like Dock Folders. Inside this folder, create another folder (or several new folders) to match the app groupings you want to create on your Dock, giving them a suitable name as you do. Alternately, you can open the Application Compiler app by entering applicationCompiler at the MATLAB prompt. In the MATLAB Compiler project window, specify the main file of the MATLAB application that you want to deploy. In the Main File section of the toolstrip, click. In the Add Files window, browse to matlabrootexternexamplescompiler, and select magicsquare.m. May 23, 2020 Create a Windows-like taskbar on your Mac to simplify and streamline the functionality of the Dock system tool. Visualize all the apps that have open desktop windows, control the size, change the item placement, and the number of windows related to a single process. UBar 4.1.6 for Mac can be downloaded from our software library for free. Oct 04, 2017 So, if anyone wants to take a shot at this, here's the script I've used to create the bootable ISO (again, it IS bootable) but it then simply reverts to the remote install routine - I'm trying to get things done from the contents of the ISO (which was created from the installer.app so all the files are actually there and should not require nor. Jul 30, 2014 Want to set up an e-mail alias in the Mail app on a Mac® OS X™? Follow the easy steps shown in this video to do so. Content in this video is provided on an 'as is' basis with no express. May 20, 2006 My OS': Mac OS X Lion, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Mac OS X Tiger, Mac OS 9.2.2, openSUSE 10.3 I was on the Mac-Forums honor roll for September 2007, 01:43 PM #2.
In effect, Microsoft stole the alias feature from Apple (if you’ve used Windows, you may know aliases as shortcuts). However, aliases usually don’t break when you move or rename the original file; shortcuts do.
An alias is different from a duplicated file. For example, the Microsoft Word 2004 application uses 19.4 megabytes (MB) of disk space. A duplicate of Microsoft Word 2004 would give you two files, each requiring nearly 20 megabytes of space on your hard drive. An alias of Microsoft Word 2004, on the other hand, uses a mere 52 kilobytes (KB).
Aliases can open any file or folder on any disk from anywhere else on any disk — which is a very good trick. But aliases are great for many other reasons:
- Convenience: Aliases enable you to make items appear to be in more than one place, which on many occasions is exactly what you want to do. For example, keeping an alias of your word processor on your Desktop and another on the Dock is convenient. You may even want a third alias of it in your Documents folder for quick access. Aliases enable you to open your word processor quickly and easily without navigating into the depths of your Applications folder each time that you need it.
- Flexibility and organization: You can create aliases and store them anywhere on your hard disk to represent the same document in several different folders. This is a great help when you need to file a document that can logically be stored in any one of several files. For example: If you write a memo to Fred Smith about the Smythe Marketing Campaign to be executed in the fourth quarter, which folder does the document go in? Smith? Smythe? Marketing? Memos? 4th Quarter? Correct answer: With aliases, it can go in all of them if you like. Then you can find the memo wherever you look, instead of guessing which folder you filed it in.
With aliases, it doesn’t matter. You can put the actual file in any folder and then create aliases of the file, placing them in any other applicable folder.
- Integrity: Some programs must remain in the same folder as their supporting files and folders. Many Classic programs, for example, don’t function properly unless they’re in the same folder as their dictionaries, thesauruses, data files (for games), templates, and so on. Thus, you can’t put the icon for those programs on the Desktop without impairing their functionality. An alias lets you access a program like that from anywhere on your hard disk.
Creating aliases
When you create an alias, its icon looks the same as the icon that it represents, but the suffix alias is tacked onto its name and a tiny arrow called a badge appears in the lower-left corner of its icon. Figure 1 shows both an alias and its parent icon (that is, the icon that opens if you open the alias).
Figure 1: An alias icon (right) and its parent.
To create an alias for an icon, do one of the following:
- Click the parent icon and choose File –> Make Alias.
- Click the parent icon and press Command+L.
- Click any file or folder, press and hold down the Command and Option keys, and then drag the file or folder while continuing to hold down the Command and Option keys.
Presto! An alias appears where you release the mouse button. Better still, aliases created this way don’t have that pesky alias suffix tacked onto them.
- Click an icon while holding down the Control key and then choose the Make Alias command from the contextual menu that appears.
- The alias appears in the same folder as its parent.
Deleting aliases
Deleting an alias is an easy chore. To delete an alias, simply drag it onto the Trash icon on the Dock. That’s it! You can also Control-click it and choose Move to Trash from the contextual menu that appears, or select the icon and use the keyboard shortcut Command+Delete.
Deleting an alias does not delete the parent item. (If you want to delete the parent item, you have to go hunt it down and kill it yourself.)
Hunting down an alias’ parent
Suppose that you create an alias of a file, and later you want to delete both the alias and its parent file — but you can’t find the parent file? What do you do? Well, you can use the Finder’s Find function (try saying that three times real fast) to find it, but here are three faster ways to find the parent icon of an alias:
- Select the alias icon and choose File –> Show Original.
- Select the alias icon and use the keyboard shortcut Command+R.
- Control-click the alias icon and choose Show Original from the contextual menu.
| Click here to return to the 'Automatically create app-launching aliases in bash' hint |
This is, more or less, how I used to launch apps. It is indeed fast and efficient. But it was rendered completely useless by Quicksilver, which is even more time saving. Is there any reason to prefer terminal based app launching over quicksilver?
Cool tip though, thanks.
Using Terminal to launch apps?
Because you can.
Although my profile is .bash_profile, not just .profile
either file name will work, although as Rob pointed out to me, if you have .bash_profile, .profile will be ignored.
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I don't have it at hand, but I use a shell script and calls to oascript to run the following (from memory)
tell application '<app name>' to activate
or something like that.
Of course the final script takes the first argument as the App Name.
that way you can just run 'launch Mail' without cluttering your environment with aliases.
I have the same for quitting apps. Very handy when I want to remotely cleanly kill an app. killall -2 '<app>' might work as well, but I don't know that that signal is as clean in the GUI. something to check out I guess.
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is that you get command line completion. Another advantage is that you don't have to deal with remembering to deal with spaces in app names and so on.
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<'>http://amarsagoo.info/namely/index.shtml>;
It does look like an interesting tool; but rather than slipping it in as a comment here, maybe you should submit a hint about it?
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YAAA!!!
I just set this up and LOVE it!
I also added a new folder by hand to activate my MS office apps and that worked nicely as well... I have at last found a good use for terminal.
On a side note... I use x-11 to connect to remote systems fairly often. Is there a way to adapt this solution so it will run in my x-11 sessions as well?
Thanks again for the great hint!
Craig
- This script uses spotlight to find applications for those of us with spotlight functionality
- I didn't require separate files for each processed directory so I lumped everything into one sorted file
- I modified the alias name substitution so that created alias names would exclude characters outside the range [a-z]
Now to get this working, I add one line to my .bashrc
It looks like my line continuation characters and escapes have been eaten by this forum! How do I add them within code or pre-formatted blocks?
Anyway, I took your version and combined it with mine. For example, the only reason I used multiple alias files was to reduce the time spent running find. Since that isn't needed with mdfind, we don't need an entire directory to hold the aliases, and since it serves no purpose, we don't need the sort. Actually, we also don't need a bunch of terminal backslashes either, since they are inside a quoted string.
Here's the newest version:
Mac Os.x Create App Alias On Desktop By Scripture
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For instance running the script with changing the relevant awk line changed to
printf '%sn',name and then
for name in ~/.osxaliases `; do which $name ;done reveals then various aliases would redefine existing executables in the path.
Some of these are actually the same application (automator) but not necessarily (/usr/bin/mail is not the same as /Applications/Mail.app)
On top of this, even pure Apple applications may exist as duplicates or just found in volatile source building directories.
I suggest that your script does the update in two stages checking potential aliases with `which` after the first stage and does not redefine already existing ones while warning the user.
So I suggest writing
printf '%st%sn',name,appl; to $ALIASFILE (change the relevant line in .profile) and then instead of just sourcing $ALIASFILE in .bashrc, do
cat $ALIASFILE| while read name appl ; do if which $name; then echo $name exists; else alias $name='open -a '$appl' ;fi; done Plus, we might want to check if the required aliases already exist as aliases but I'm not sure how to do that other than grepping it from the output of alias. with this duplicates coming from different Application directories could also be detected.
For another problem technical see the next post.
V
Mac Os.x Create App Alias On Desktop By Script Free
For instance /Applications/GraphicConverter/GraphicConverter will turn into :
alias applications=open -a '/Applications/GraphicConverter' which is clearly not what we want V
Good points;
I was thinking about that the other night - including how I don't think '.dock' applications exist any more; but you're wrong about graphic converter - that particular awk statement is used for building the alias name, not the application name.
For example, from my aliases:
alias adobephotoshopelements2='open -a '/Applications/Adobe Photoshop Elements 2/Photoshop Elements 2.0'
And that works fine.
But you're right about finding too much with this - despite the search restrictions, it seems to be finding extra copies of applications that aren't in the specified directories, it also seems to do some weird things like this:
alias silverkeeper1.1.3='open -a '/Applications/SilverKeeper 1.1.3/SilverKeeper'
alias silverkeeper1.1.3='open -a '/Applications/SilverKeeper 1.1.3/SilverKeeper ReadMe'
Which is obviously bad. SilverKeeper Readme *is* an application, apparently it launches the Help file for SilverKeeper.
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Mac Os.x Create App Alias On Desktop By Script Windows 10
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