applist - List app directories in macOS! 🚀

These utilities list app locations in macOS

The Swift (68.2 ms) and Objective-C (78.4 ms) implementations try to mimic mdfind's (29.1 ms) behavior, but run slower than it.

Getting Started

Note

This utility is only intended to run in macOS.

Prerequisites

When you are building applist, ensure you have either:

• A Swift compiler
• An Objective-C compiler.

Installing

If you have brew installed, just run:

$ brew install Neved4/tap/applist

Otherwise, first clone the repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/Neved4/applist

To build all variants, go to the project directory and run:

$ make all

Alternatively, to build the Objective-C version run:

$ clang -framework Cocoa -o applist-objc applist.mm

For the Swift version, run:

$ swiftc -O applist.swift -o applist-swift

Done!

Alternatively, if you'd rather not install or compile anything, feel free to add it as a function to your shell .profile:

applist() {
    mdfind "kMDItemContentType == 'com.apple.application-bundle'"
}

Usage

$ applist | grep "Docker.app"
/Applications/Docker.app

This comes handy for manual Homebrew reinstalls that lie outside the default install path:

$ brew reinstall --cask docker --applist $(applist | grep Docker)

Benchmarks

All programs were benchmarked with hyperfine under arm64:

Command	Mean [ms]	Min [ms]	Max [ms]	Relative
applist-sh	29.1 ± 1.7	27.2	33.7	1.00
applist-objc	68.2 ± 3.5	63.7	81.5	2.34 ± 0.18
applist-swift	78.4 ± 4.2	71.0	89.9	2.69 ± 0.21

See Also

For other shell functions like applist, check out apputils.

License

applist is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

See the LICENSE file for details.