To reorganize this list close the Terminal and reopen it. Once Terminal reopens type in top –o rsize and press the enter key on your keyboard. By choosing your personalized shortcut, you can launch a Terminal window using a shortcut key instead of pulling up the menu and selecting the option to launch one. If you highlight one of the apps/processes, the options at the top will light up, allowing you to Quit Process, or click Inspect for more information. Press Cmd + Alt + Escape to see the Force Quit Applications menu.
Are you looking to navigate through applications on your Mac using the Terminal? This article will guide you on how to view and open applications directly from the command line.
This script won’t launch the app while checking the paths like the Applescript one. But I realized that the command above works even if the apps weren’t in /Applications nor ~/Applications directory. Why not just set add path to to the bin of the app. I suppose the brute-force way to accomplish the above goal would be to make two copies of the Google Chrome application bundle under the respective names.
If you use the command line in Terminal, the top command is useful too. In Terminal, type man top to see the various options. Activity Monitor shows you a wealth of information about each process.
This is a old discussion, but still comes up on Google searches, so I thought I’d add a couple of ¢. I had high CPU activity and wanted to see what I did that was triggering it, so being able to see how processes were chained (spawned) was more interesting to me. To understand the relationship between processes, pstree is your friend. In the case of a Mac, there are multiple ways to see all the Running Apps and Programs, ranging from the simple option of using the Dock to using the Terminal command.
Simple, here replace the “APP” by name of the app you want to launch. Get early access and see previews of new features. David has loved the iPhone since covering the original 2007 launch; later his obsession expanded to include iPad and Apple Watch.
Viewing Applications in macOS Terminal
To see a list of all the applications installed on your Mac, you can use the following command:
Both work fine and don’t keep either Terminal or a script application running for more than a second or so. Using Automator, you can even create a Service if you choose so. In Windows I can append the arguments to the shortcut properties, but since Macs don’t use shortcut per se and run the applications directly, this isn’t possible. The app /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor is what you’re looking for.
I wanted to be able to start them from Spotlight, as is my habit for starting Mac apps. You could also probably do something kludgey by passing parameters in using environment variables. Starting in Catalina (10.15), macOS uses a split-volume format, with the system software on a locked volume and a separate “Data” volume for user data, user-installed software, etc. Most folders contain just one of these things, so they reside on just one volume, but the Applications folder has both, so it’s handled… Terminal can be used for all sorts of different tasks. Some of them can be performed in the Finder but are quicker in Terminal.
ls /Applications
This command will display a list of all the applications located in the “Applications” folder on your Mac. You can scroll through the list to find the application you are looking for.
Opening Applications from macOS Terminal
If you want to open a specific application from the Terminal, you can use the “open” command followed by the application’s path. For example:
open /Applications/Safari.app
This command will launch the Safari web browser directly from the Terminal.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Can I open any application from the Terminal?
- Is there a way to search for a specific application?
Yes, you can open almost any application installed on your Mac using the “open” command in the Terminal.
Unfortunately, the Terminal does not have a built-in search feature. You will need to manually scroll through the list of applications to find what you are looking for.
By following these steps, you can easily view and open applications in macOS Terminal, providing you with a new way to interact with your Mac system.
