Switch Applications From The Command Line With Apple's osascript

May 2022

You can open and/or swith to an application from the command line using Apple's osascript tool to run either javascript or apple script.

The javascript looks like this:

osascript -l JavaScript -e "Application('Sublime Text').activate()"

And the apple script version looks like this:

osascript -e 'tell application "Sublime Text"' -e 'activate' -e 'end tell'

In some cases, you'll need to use the full path to the app

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