Open new windows without many instances on MacOS

[spikespaz]

In my AeroSpace keybinds, I have one exec-and-forget for Ghostty to open a new window.

For that I am using: open -n -a Ghostty.app

The manpage for open on MacOS says that -n opens a new instance of -a even if one is already running. This means I can successfully open new windows with the keybind, but I now have twenty Ghostty icons in the dock.

I can probably expect that enabling quit-after-last-window-closed will mitigate this symptom, but is there a better way to open a new window with the existing Ghostty.app instance?

[rhodes-b]

#2353 is generally the given answer for controlling already running ghostty instance

[spikespaz]

There should be a way to do this without IPC. Seems overly complicated to need to write a script to simply open a new window.

I don't like that solution because: what if I don't have a Ghostty instance running? Now I need to figure out if it is running and change the script to open a new instance if it isn't.

[00-kat]

The current workaround is to use AppleScript to send the “open window” keybinding to Ghostty.

[vaygr]

Probably a duplicate of #3563.

I ended up writing a small AppleScript:

#!/usr/bin/osascript

set termName to "Ghostty"

tell application termName
    if it is running
        tell application "System Events" to tell process termName
            click menu item "New Window" of menu "File" of menu bar 1
        end tell
    else
        activate
    end if
end tell

and then calling it in skhd like so:

# terminal emulator
alt - return : $HOME/bin/ghostty++