Mac OS X: Bring GUI applications to foreground when launched from the command line

Question

Is there a way to bring GUI applications to the foreground when starting them from within Terminal on Mac OS X? If I run

/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit

in Terminal, TextEdit opens in the background. This is quite annoying if you're using "make && ./run" when developing GUI applications.

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 01 '13 at 23:22

6

There seems to be even shorter variant:

> open -a TextEdit

answered Jan 01 '13 at 23:22

brablc

Thank you! So much better than: `open "$(mdfind Minecraft.app | grep Minecraft.app | tail -1)"` – Bruno Bronosky Dec 22 '15 at 03:08

Matt Ball · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-15T17:51:17.893

6

At least for TextEdit and similar GUI apps, open will work:

> open /Applications/TextEdit.app

edited Oct 15 '11 at 17:51

answered Oct 15 '11 at 17:44

Matt Ball

1

Thanks! I've tried to use `open` before, but didn't realize I can open the whole bundle, too. If you use `open /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit`, a new terminal window is launched and the program is again put to the background. – jnsg Oct 15 '11 at 17:59
1

@jnsg, I'd never thought of using `open` with the executable path. That's interesting behavior. It makes sense, though: If you open an executable from Finder, it will run it in Terminal. – Chris Page Jul 02 '12 at 22:06
Is there a way to use `open` or some other command that (a) brings the app into the foreground and (b) doesn't exit once the app is launched? – Spencer Williams Jan 03 '15 at 01:46
Now if only it would inherit the child process's stdout/stderr output streams, then I could use it to spawn a foreground process from Node.js and capture output. – Myk Melez Mar 01 '17 at 17:42
@SpencerWilliams I just posted an answers for accomplish what you asked for – jviotti Nov 29 '22 at 01:41

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 29 '22 at 01:39

The answers described in this post use open(1) with its default options. This has two limitations that might be important in your use case:

To solve these:

open takes a -W option for open to wait on the application to quit
open takes --stdout and --stderr option that you can pipe to your shell (or script) TTY

For example:

open -W --stdout $(tty) --stderr $(tty) <path/to/Bundle.app>

3 Answers3