ojford/loginitems

Simple utility for managing macOS login items from the command line

loginitems

loginitems is a simple command line tool to manage applications that launch on startup on OS X. While previously possible with launchctl this is deprecated as of some time before or with 10.11.

Installation

I'm a big brew fan - so while this repo isn't popular enough to be included in official formulae, if you share my preference then you can run the formula from my fork here:

brew tap OJFord/formulae
brew install loginitems

Otherwise, you'll need to clone/download the repo to somewhere on your path, and chmod +x each of the included scripts.

Usage

Usage: loginitems [-h | -a NAME [-p PATH] [-s HIDE?] | -d NAME | -l]
  -h Show this help message.
  -a Add an application, optionally hide with -s false.
  -p Path to application; defaults to /Applications/NAME.app.
  -s Show/hide application; defaults to true (no hide).
  -d Delete an application from login items.
  -l List all login items (default if no option specified).

For example:

% loginitems -a Caffeine 
% loginitems -l
Caffeine
% loginitems -d Caffeine
% loginitems -l
% loginitems -a "Custom Name" -p "/Applications/Caffeine.app"
% loginitems -a "App" -p "/that/I/decided/to/store/elsewhere/because/yolo.not-app"
% loginitems -l
Custom Name, App
%

Todo

• While the Applescript use may well work (untested) on earlier versions, I hope to check OS X version and use launchctl submit on older versions, or defaults write on ancient ones

loginitems's Issues

`loginitems` Unusable Over `su` Session

When I ran loginitems -l under su -l $OTHER_REDACTED_USER, I got the following error from osascript:

/usr/local/bin/loginitems-ls:68:72: execution error: An error of type -10810 has occurred. (-10810)

I suspect that this probably has to do with the fact that su does something funny and creates an execution environment that loginitems wasn't expecting. I don't recognize and couldn't find any documentation on that particular error code, though, so good luck if you decide to chase down the root cause of this problem. In the meantime, I'll just switch users to use loginitems under other accounts.

loginitems -a on loginitems itself

I'd like to have a simple script run on login - before any of the others:

loginitems -d "Cisco Webex Meetings"

Is that possible?