We make heavy use of Google Calendar here at work. Unfortunately I rarely remember to look at it unless an alert has specifically been set up to get my attention.
This morning I set up my Mac to open Google Calendar in my web browser every day at 10:15am.
How do you do that? Turns out it's not hard.
You can open a URL at the terminal command line—
"Whoa! Did you just say 'terminal command line?' I thought you said this wasn't hard?"
Well, it isn't! All you really need to know about the terminal application is this:
1. It's not hard.
2. Go to the Finder, click "Applications" (at lower left), open up "Utilities" in the pane at right, and then double-click "Terminal." Now you have a terminal window to type commands in.
3. After each terminal command, one generally presses the Enter (return) key. So if I say nothing to the contrary, assume you're meant to do that after each command.
You can open a URL in your web browser from the terminal command line by typing a command like this. Just copy and paste
your Google Calendar's URL from the address bar:
open 'https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/punkave.com/render?tab=mc'
(Note that if your URL actually contains the
' character you'll need to escape it with a
\ in front.)
OK, you've opened a web page from the command line. Now, how do you schedule that to happen every day?
Luckily the Mac, like any good Unix box, offers a utility called
cron which does things for you at scheduled times. To set that up, all you have to do is edit your cron jobs with the
crontab command...
But this part is a little bit of a PITA: by default, the
crontab command opens your cron jobs file with
vi, an old-school Unix text editor. I'm happy with it, but you don't need to be. So I'm going to first walk you through how to switch things around so that
crontab opens things in good old TextEdit.
I'll also show you how to set up a convenient command you can use in the terminal window to edit any file with TextEdit from the command line.
We'll start by editing your
~/.profile file. This file contains commands that the terminal window runs when you first start it up.
First, use the
touch command to ensure the file exists. TextEdit doesn't like being asked to edit files that don't yet exist:
touch ~/.profile
Now try this command (hint: don't suffer, copy and paste it into terminal):
/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit ~/.profile
Your
.profile file is open in TextEdit. This file contains Unix shell commands that should be run every time a new shell window opens for you. At first it will probably be empty.
Add these lines at the end of the file (which might be empty to start):
# Use TextEdit for crontab and similar commands
# that want to use your default editor
export VISUAL=/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
# Use TextEdit when you type: edit filename
alias edit='/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit'
The lines that begin with
# are comments and the command shell will ignore them. I provide them so you can remember why you did this stuff later.
A word of warning: when launched this way, TextEdit tends to open behind the terminal window. You might have to apple-tab around a bit to find it.
Finally, close your terminal window and open a new one. This ensures that the commands in
~/.profile have been run. Alternatively you can use this command to run the commands in
~/.profile in your current terminal window:
source ~/.profile
