macOS Documents and GUI Applications

Likely for historical reasons, macOS does not pass documents sent to application bundles as argv. This repository is a simple demo of the lack of this feature¹.

What this repository does

Simply, this repository:

1. creates an macOS Application Bundle called Toy.app²
2. writes anything passed to argv to /tmp/argv.txt

Using butonageo/cargo-bundle

What this repository demonstrates

macOS does not pass documents in argv to app bundles when invoked; moreover cargo-bundle does not have this functionality, either.

What we'd like to accomplish:

1. enable cargo-bundle to automatically enable macOS bundles to receive documents using argv
2. petition Apple to offer a flag in Info.plist file to enable application bundles to receive documents, much as they do on traditional linux and other *nix systems

Why? today it is easier than ever to build cross-platform application bundles for Windows, Linux, and macOS. That said, macOS' current implementation places a large burden on developers. For example, there are 47 comments on this GitHub PR for the a GUI-harness for the neovim text editor, which consitute dozens of developer hours spent on attempting to rectify this issue.

Related this issue in the cargo-bundle codebase.

Building

git clone git@github.com:abhillman/macos-argv.git
cargo build

Footnotes

1. Apple instead requires applications to use a bespoke message-passing implementation; see Wikipedia: Apple Events and Apple Developer Documentation: Apple Events ↩

2. Accomplished via simply adding relevant metadata to Cargo.toml and adding the cargo-bundle crate ↩