How to output terminal command into a widget in OSX dashboard?

Question

I want to have a way of outputting a terminal command, like:

$ cat todo.org | awk '{ print $1 }' > dashboard_widget

Into a dashboard widget, not necessarily the text output of a command. Maybe a "iTerm2" dashboard that only outputs but doesn't get input from the user.

What I want to do with this is to have the output of a emacs buffer with my todo list.

Answer 1

There are dashboard widgets that execute shell scripts and display the output.

Examples:

• http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/networking_security/shellwatcher.html

• http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/developer/quickcommand.html

Your script can call emacs in batch mode to preprocess and export your todo.org into plain text mode, or you can use your awk preprocessing instead.