Automator Pack
If you’re a developer or sysadmin, you probably spend a lot of time in Terminal. But getting it launched, then getting to the right place can be a chore. Sure, you can type “cd <space>”, then drag the folder from the Finder, then hit the return key, but that gets old fast.
Back in the Jaguar/Panther days, there was a Finder contextual menu plug–in, but it didn’t work on Tiger, and the developer had abandoned it. Automator was a prime candidate to replace it, and I did see some nice solutions on Mac OS X Hints, but they all had some drawbacks. I wanted it to work even if a file was selected, using its enclosing folder, but, in attempting that, I learned that AppleScript hates FileVault. Since I had been casting about for a tacow presentation topic, I thought I’d try to whip up an Objective–C approach (and when you have a hammer…). You can get the result here.
There are a couple of actions: one to filter a Finder selection down to a folder (for example, if you have a file selected, it’ll turn it into a reference to its parent folder); another to open a Terminal session at the passed in location. Also, there are a couple of workflows: one to actually launch Terminal, and the other to build the Release version of an Xcode project. See the enclosed PDF for instructions.
Once you install them, there will be a couple of new items under the Automator menu, like this:
If you’re interested, you can check out a copy of the source–code from tacow’s Google Code repository.
