How to make a message appear on the screen?

Question

I'm trying to set up a kind of intercom system between Mac, Windows, and Linux boxes at home.

Question: How can I make an arbitrary message appear on the graphical screen of Mac OS X?

For instance, I'm looking for a command such as:

$ show-message "Time for dinner!"

which shows Time for dinner! on the graphical screen, maybe in a dialog box.

I think you're going to have a very hard time to do this cross-platform. Windows has netsend, but a quick Google search shows there's no easy equivalent on the Mac. Growl has some network announcement capabilities and is available for Mac and Windows so maybe that's a possibility. — Saaru Lindestøkke, Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 1:22
Just did it! kdialog and cocoaDialog over ssh do the job in Linux and Mac respectively. — n.r., Commented Dec 16, 2013 at 4:00

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:45:19Z

Yes, this would be fairly trivial with ssh to gain access to the Mac and then run whatever command you prefer.

Is there a way to add items to notification center through terminal or other means? - which covers SeNotifier and the more general purpose terminal notifier which both leverage OS X's notification center app for the GUI.
How can I trigger a Notification Center notification from an AppleScript or shell script? - which covers both AppleScript and Terminal scripts - either of which will work when called from ssh from Linux, Mac or Windows remotely. It also adds in Growl2 as a GUI for messaging on OS X.

n.r. · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-16 03:58:13Z

0

bmike provided a link at which mivk suggests another quite lightweight solution: cocoaDialog (Mac OS X 10.4+)

answered Dec 16, 2013 at 3:58

n.r.

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