What better way to start a new week than with a little geek. Geekiness. Tools for the Mac that the average Mac user avoids. Tools like Lingon X.
Your Mac has plenty of Unix roots, evident to most Mac users in Terminal.app and multi-user mode, but there is more going on under the hood. One of the very best is launchd, the launch daemon in macOS High Sierra (and on older Macs, too). Think powerful power– in the right hands. Or, rather, mouse clicks.
Lingon X helps to overcome some of the geek in macOS with features to start apps according to a schedule or event; even run a script or a command automatically, either regularly or at a specific time on the clock, or when something else happens.
Get your Mac geek hat on. Lingon X is way cool but not always for the Mac faint of heart.
See? Geeky. Except powerful and the learning curve, frankly, is rather gentle considering all that launchd and Lingon X can do.
This nifty utility can run jobs as root, launch apps or utilities or scripts at any time or under specific conditions.
- Start an app, a script or run a command automatically whenever you want it to. You can schedule it to run at a specific times, regularly or when something special happens.
- It can also make sure that an app or a script automatically restarts if it crashes. Lingon X can do all this for you and much more.
- Lets you run things automatically by modifying configuration files for the built-in system function called launchd so the system handles running the jobs so you don’t need to have Lingon open after you have saved your job.
- Released outside Mac App Store to be able to include requested features.
- Still available in Mac App Store for those who still use OS X 10.7 Lion or prefer the comfort and convenience of the Mac App Store.
I prefer the non-Mac App Store version, of course. The developer upgrades Lingon regularly and adds more capability (although I don’t understand why all the old versions are still around).
To get started, create a launcher, give it a name, tell Lingon which app to run, then set up a schedule as in the image above.
Lingon will display a list of all such actions on your Mac so you can get an idea of which other applications use such background processes. The Advanced mode gives even more options, so exercise that domain with care.
Other than the strange older version licensing options, Lingon is a solid performer, a good way to dig into some of the Mac’s under-the-hood capabilities where you can learn a few of the functions Mac geeks love.