How to Send an iMessage From Command Line

By  on  

As somewhat of a recluse, believe me when I say that text messages, instant messenger, and iMessage have relieved me of loads of anxiety and wasted time with short, meaningless voice chat. It's been a decade since these communication types have become popular so we've moved on from appreciate these technologies to trying to optimize them.

My family and friends are deep into the Apple ecosystem so I frequently receive texts via iMessage (or Message on Mac); at the same time, I'm within a Mac terminal much of my day,. At this point, it's a bit of a hardship (poor me!) to even open the Messages app, and I'd prefer to send messages via command line.

To send a message via command line, you can type the following:

osascript -e 'tell application "Messages" to send "DWB and MooTools FTW!" to buddy "David Walsh"'

I'd recommend creating an alias for this command, which would accept a user and a message.

Command line wins are amazing time savers. Finding a way to accomplish tasks with your usual workflow will make you infinitely more efficient!

Recent Features

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    NSFW Blocker Using MooTools and CSS

    One of my guilty pleasures is scoping out the latest celebrity gossip from PerezHilton.com, DListed.com, and JoBlo.com. Unfortunately, these sites occasionally post NSFW pictures which makes checking these sites on lunch a huge gamble -- a trip to HR's office could be just a click away. Since...

  • By
    Introducing LazyLoad 2.0

    While improvements in browsers means more cool APIs for us to play with, it also means we need to maintain existing code.  With Firefox 4's release came news that my MooTools LazyLoad plugin was not intercepting image loading -- the images were loading regardless of...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!