Home/ Questions/Q 4050726
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-20T14:06:21+00:00

I need a terminal to a Linux vm inside my osx installation. Its a

  • 0

I need a terminal to a Linux vm inside my osx installation. Its a dropdown terminal and in the vm I can use F12 as a global hotkey to toggle show/hide.

The name of the dropdown terminal is yakuake, I know there is a dropdown terminal that works with osx to, but for various reasons, I need both a Linux terminal and easy access to it.

There is several things that makes this difficult.

  • VMware fusion doesnt have any good applescript support
  • I need to be able to run several vm’s on the same time.
  • Speed
  • Hiding the application.

I am using iKey to get a global hotkey on my mac binded to a little oneliner:

  • /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmrun -T fusion -gu username -gp password runScriptInGuest “/Users/username/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Ubuntu.vmwarevm/Ubuntu.vmx” -interactive “/bin/bash” “/home/username/bin/toggle_yakuake”

The /home/username/bin/toggle_yakuake script is just a:

  • /usr/bin/xdotool key Control+Shift+Y # Which is what I bound to yakuake

This works, except its taking around 1-2 seconds, and yakuake will show up below every other windows.
Therefor I will use logic to just do this if yakuake isnt running, and then I can just hide/show it in osx to toggle it instantly.
However, I am able to show yakuake using a simple “tell application “Yakuake – Ubuntu” to activate. I am not able to hide it without hiding every other application belonging to the same vm.

It seems that every application spawned by vmware is tied together a little to tight.
Even if I find the pid of yakuake on my osx installastion, and uses it like:

tell application "System Events"
    set yakuakeproc to every process whose unix id is 58518
    repeat with proc in yakuakeproc
        set the frontmost of proc to true
    end repeat
end tell

It will hide every application belonging to that vm.

I have tried to figure out a solution for this for days now. Is there anyone that have any tips or anything? How can I get applescript to hide one specific application which is inside my vm?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The way you’re starting yakukake is unnecessarily complex. You should be able to simply run the VMware proxy application, rather than using a shell script; i.e. your tell application "Yakukake - Ubuntu" to activate.

    Then your only real problem is how to show and hide an application from a script. I think it is possible to do this with System Events, but it’s easier to do it with my tool appswitch:

    I don’t have GUI Linux installed in VMware Fusion but here’s an example with Windows.

    To view information about a process:

    % appswitch -La Notepad 
        PSN   PID TYPE CREA NAME                PATH (bundle identifier)
 15994688.0 24758 APPL ???? Notepad             /Users/nicholas/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/Boot Camp.vmwarevm/Applications/Notepad — Windows 7.app (com.vmware.proxyApp.564dbc100b31a4b5-4f8d8088bf0c3705.2009924420)

    To hide it:

    % appswitch -ha Notepad

    To show it:

    % appswitch -a Notepad

    That’s it.

    • 0