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
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Tooltips

    We all know that you can make shapes with CSS and a single HTML element, as I've covered in my CSS Triangles and CSS Circles posts.  Triangles and circles are fairly simply though, so as CSS advances, we need to stretch the boundaries...

  • By
    CSS Selection Styling

    The goal of CSS is to allow styling of content and structure within a web page.  We all know that, right?  As CSS revisions arrive, we're provided more opportunity to control.  One of the little known styling option available within the browser is text selection styling.

Discussion

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