Suitcase: create UI for command line invocations on the fly (macOS)

ctietze

It's good times.

Check out Suitcase: https://github.com/Impedimenta/Suitcase

It's a command line utility for macOS that produces interactive user interfaces. It's like building simple macOS apps, but from scripts.

You can define what the UI looks like and how components are interlinked as parameters to the Suitcase command line utility. The program will interpret your app definition, show windows and UI components accordingly.

It's hard to explain. It's like building an Automator workflow/app that you can execute, but a macOS native user interface is part of the script. With Automator and AppleScript, you can hardly go beyond simple dialog boxes. Suitcase allows you to create fairly complex interfaces.

• Example with a single "Hello world" button that executes say "Hello World!" on the command line, i.e. synthesizes the words as speech
• War Games example demo video, and code and explanation
• Confusingly complex demo of a ton of features, as a blurry low-res GIF: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Impedimenta/Suitcase/master/Resources/Hero.gif

Once you get accustomed to the declarative user interface syntax, you can do pretty complex things with this, it seems.

As of now, the dev didn't release the source code, yet, and wants to clean it up some more, first. I'd consider waiting until then to inspect the code to mitigate risk.

Until then, we can all appreciate the examples and come up with ideas for Zettelkasten task automation, like file/folder drag & drop link health analysis, or something like that