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 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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