RhetTbull

Recent Projects in Finder Sidebar

Show your last 3 visited code projects as a Finder sidebar folder, updated automatically by zsh.

The Problem

There's no reliable public API for programmatically adding items to the macOS Finder sidebar Favorites. The old LSSharedFileList API was deprecated in macOS 10.11 and removed in 10.13. Tools like mysides no longer work on modern macOS (Sequoia).

I keep all my code projects in ~/code. I frequently want to drag files to a recently used project (I work mostly in the terminal). This shows a work-around to keep the Finder Favorites sidebar updated with the last 3 code projects I've worked on.

RhetTbull

#!/usr/bin/env python3

"""Get info about a Python package including install path and version"""

import argparse
import importlib.metadata as metadata

def main():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Get info about a Python package')
    parser.add_argument('package', help='Name of the Python package')

RhetTbull

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from datetime import datetime

from Foundation import NSURL, NSDate, NSURLCreationDateKey


def set_file_creation_date(file_path, creation_date):
    """
    Sets the creation date of a file to the specified date

RhetTbull

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# venv.sh - Initialize a uv-based venv for a Python repo with direnv integration

set -e

# Remove .python-version if it exists
if [ -f ".python-version" ]; then
    echo "🧹 Removing existing .python-version"
    rm .python-version

RhetTbull

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
"""Generate captions for videos in Apple Photos using Apple's Media Analysis Service"""

# run with uv: `uv run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/RhetTbull/9035ff260d123413012758252a76d82a/raw/a5be13b0bcb1d5c2224ba1bb0828b652601b2482/video_captions.py`

# Following allows you to run the script with uv via `uv run video_captions.py`
# /// script
# dependencies = [
#   "pyobjc-core",
#   "pyobjc-framework-Photos",

RhetTbull

"""Get named timezone for a location on macOS using CoreLocation

To use this script, you need to have pyobjc-core and pyobjc-framework-CoreLocation installed:

    pip install pyobjc-core pyobjc-framework-CoreLocation

This script uses CoreLocation to get the timezone for a given latitude and longitude
as well as the timezone offset for a given date.

It effectively does the same thing as python packages like [tzfpy](https://pypi.org/project/tzfpy/)

RhetTbull

"""Resolve path to macOS alias file; requires installation of pyobjc: `pip install pyobjc`"""

from Foundation import (
    NSURL,
    NSData,
    NSError,
    NSURLBookmarkResolutionWithoutMounting,
    NSURLBookmarkResolutionWithoutUI,
)

RhetTbull

"""Resolve path to macOS alias file

Given a path to a file that is a macOS alias, resolve the path to the original file

Requires: pip install pyobjc-core
"""

from Foundation import (
    NSURL,
    NSData,

RhetTbull

"""Resolve path to original file pointed to by macOS alias

To use: 
pip install pyobjc-core

python3 resolve_macos_alias_path.py /path/to/alias
"""

from Foundation import (
    NSURL,

RhetTbull

"""Given a PyPI package name, print the latest version number of the package.

This uses the standard library instead of requests to avoid adding a dependency to the project.
"""

from __future__ import annotations

import json
import ssl
import sys