Home/ Questions/Q 761091
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T15:47:48+00:00

I can open a Terminal tab using the following AppleScript: tell application Terminal set

  • 0

I can open a Terminal tab using the following AppleScript:

tell application "Terminal"
    set myTab to do script "exec sleep 1"
    get myTab
end tell

This returns a string like: tab 1 of window id 3263 of application "Terminal". This is great, I can see the window id 3263 and tab number 1 (although I don’t know how to query myTab to get only these values).

In the Cocoa ScriptingBridge, I can do:

SBApplication  *terminal;
SBObject       *tab;

terminal = [SBApplication applicationWithBundleIdentifier:@"com.apple.terminal"]
tab = [terminal doScript:@"exec sleep 1" in:nil]

How do I get the window id and tab number from the tab object?

Edit 2009/4/27 – Why?

In answer to why I want to do this – I am opening a command in a Terminal window (as above), and am getting back the tab object. However I want to move/resize this window, so I need to get access to the tab’s “window” object.

I am using Objective-C (well actually, Objective-C bridged from Perl), and want to stick to standard OS components, so I believe I only have the NSAppleScript and ScriptingBridge frameworks to play with (all the perl applescript modules broke with 64bit carbon removal). I would try NSAppleScript, but processing the returned values seems to be a black-art.

My current solution is to get the TTY of the tab object (guaranteed unique) and enumerate every tab of every window until I find the window containing the tab. I assumed that this couldn’t be the best way (it sure ain’t fast!).

Edit 2009/4/30 – Solution

Based on the suggestions of “has” below, I braved the NSAppleEventDescriptor API. Initially, I was only able to get to this with NSAppleScript’s executeAndReturnError() call. However I found that NSAppleScript was much, much slower than ScriptingBridge.

After using ClassDump to extract some more SBObject calls, I found the undocumented specifierDescription() and qualifiedSpecifier() calls. The former gives me the nice “tab X of window id Y” string. The latter returns the apple event descriptor, which I can then decode.

My final code (in perl) is:

use Foundation;

NSBundle->bundleWithPath_('/System/Library/Frameworks/ScriptingBridge.framework')->load;

# Create an OSType (bid endian long) from a string
sub OSType ($) { return unpack('N', $_[0]) }

my $terminal = SBApplication->applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.terminal");

my $tab         = $terminal->doScript_in_("exec sleep 1", undef);
my $tab_ev_desc = $tab->qualifiedSpecifier;
my $tab_id      = $tab_ev_desc->descriptorForKeyword_(OSType 'seld')->int32Value;
my $win_ev_desc = $tab_ev_desc->descriptorForKeyword_(OSType 'from');
my $window_id   = $win_ev_desc->descriptorForKeyword_(OSType 'seld')->int32Value;

print "Window:$window_id Tab:$tab_id\n";
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Technically you can’t; a better question is why do want to?

    (Well, okay, you could if you use the Apple Event Manager API or objc-appscript, both of which can give you a raw AEDesc/NSAppleEventDescriptor which you can recursively pull apart yourself. Or you might poke around in SB to see if there’s an undocumented API to get at the underlying AEDesc, but caveat emptor, of course. Alternatively, there may be a better way to achieve your actual goal without resorting to hackery, but you’d need to provide more information.)

    • 0