terminal-notifier is a command-line tool to send Mac OS X User Notifications, which are available in Mac OS X 10.8.

It is currently packaged as an application bundle, because NSUserNotification does not work from a ‘Foundation tool’. radar://11956694

The Notification Center always uses the application’s own icon, there’s currently no way to specify a custom icon for a notification. The only way to use this tool with your own icon is to include a build of terminal-notifier with your icon instead.

This tool will be used by Kicker to show the status of commands which are executed due to filesystem changes. (v3.0.0)

Prebuilt binaries, which are code-signed and ready to use, are available from the downloads section.

Or if you want to use this from Ruby, you can install it through RubyGems:

$ [sudo] gem install terminal-notifier

$ ./terminal-notifier.app/Contents/MacOS/terminal-notifier -[message|group|list] [VALUE|ID|ID] [options]

In order to use terminal-notifier, you have to call the binary inside the application bundle.

The Ruby gem, which wraps this tool, does have a bin wrapper. If installed you can simply do:

$ terminal-notifier -[message|group|list] [VALUE|ID|ID] [options]

This will obviously be a bit slower than using the tool without the wrapper.

At a minimum, you have to specify either the -message , the -remove option or the -list option.

-message VALUE [required]

The message body of the notification.

-title VALUE

The title of the notification. This defaults to ‘Terminal’.

-subtitle VALUE

The subtitle of the notification.

-group ID

Specifies the ‘group’ a notification belongs to. For any ‘group’ only one notification will ever be shown, replacing previously posted notifications.

A notification can be explicitely removed with the -remove option, describe below.

Examples are:

• The sender’s name to scope the notifications by tool.
• The sender’s process ID to scope the notifications by a unique process.
• The current working directory to scope notifications by project.

-remove ID [required]

Removes a notification that was previously sent with the specified ‘group’ ID, if one exists. If used with the special group "ALL", all message are removed.

-list ID [required]

Lists details about the specified ‘group’ ID. If used with the special group "ALL", details about all currently active messages are displayed.

The output of this command is tab-separated, which makes it easy to parse.

-activate ID

Specifies which application should be activated when the user clicks the notification.

You can find the bundle identifier of an application in its Info.plist file inside the application bundle.

Examples are:

• com.apple.Terminal to activate Terminal.app
• com.apple.Safari to activate Safari.app

-open URL

Specifies a resource to be opened when the user clicks the notification. This can be a web or file URL, or any custom URL scheme.

-execute COMMAND

Specifies a shell command to run when the user clicks the notification.

All the works are available under the MIT license. Except for ‘Terminal.icns’, which is a copy of Apple’s Terminal.app icon and as such is copyright of Apple.

Copyright (C) 2012 Eloy Durán [email protected]

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.