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
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips Using MooTools

    The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below: Here's how to accomplish this same effect using MooTools. The XHTML The above XHTML was taken directly from the jQuery homepage -- no changes. The CSS The above CSS has been slightly modified to match the CSS rules already...

  • By
    JavaScript Copy to Clipboard

    "Copy to clipboard" functionality is something we all use dozens of times daily but the client side API around it has always been lacking; some older APIs and browser implementations required a scary "are you sure?"-style dialog before the content would be copied to clipboard -- not great for...

Discussion

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