What does HackerNews think of Platypus?

Create native Mac applications from command line scripts.

Language: Objective-C

#60 in macOS
#6 in Swift
#6 in JavaScript
> Which apps do you use actually it for?

neovim, mutt, tig, weechat

> That's what aliases are for (or you could rename the binary?)!

Unfortunately, it's not that simple on macOS for app bundles. The human readable name of the app bundle really doesn't matter that much to the operating system -- it's the contents of Info.plist that matter. In order to have a separate app that can be Cmd+Tab'd to, you have to have a separate app bundle, separate app bundle identifier, etc. There's really not a way around it on macOS that I've seen.

(And to be clear, aliases do work on the command line. I'm talking specifically about GUI apps - which is my primary method of separating my different activities. Terminal emulator tabs are not good enough.)

This also doesn't solve the performance problems with any of the various GUI applications, nor does it solve my problem for other applications that I want to run.

> By the way, do you know the app https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus that can generate app bundles on a Mac?

I do! I tried this route first, but it falls apart when you start a GUI application from the script that you supply to platypus. If your script is e.g. `wezterm start`, it'll just start up another instance of a wezterm-branded GUI app in addition to the wrapper app that Platypus spits out.

Random fact; this website is created and maintained by Sveinbjörn Þórðarson who also made Platypus (https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus) and Sloth (https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Sloth) — software that Mac nerds might be familiar with.

Sveinbjörn is a ball of energy that just radiates positives for human society.

They also develop an app for that I have used for years to open Burp Suite on Mac called Platypushttps://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus

Platypus allows you to create a Mac [dot]app wrapper around any type of scripts.

Awesome, I welcome any tools that simplify the GUI deployment process.

I've built quite a collection of scripts that clean and process my company's domain-specific data. I once needed to share that with a data-scientist/computer-Luddite (sadly too common) who wasn't comfortable running CLI scripts. The solution I came up with used Platypus[0] to generate a lovely app wrapper where files could be dragged in.

[0]: https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus