Comment by dspillett
5 hours ago
> This isn't entirely accurate. Plenty of apps run Terminal commands in the background (for some reason).
A lot do it because sometimes there is no convenient library wrapping what they are trying to check or execute that they are aware of, and running a cli command is generally cheap unless you are doing it in a tight loop. A lot of the time this is “it'll do until I find the right library or bindings” code that should have been fixed before release, but it isn't all as bad as running top as you describe.
CLI tools are not to be feared or considered somehow hacky. However much big tech wants people to think that computing is all about some magic apps, Mac OS is still unix, and composing specialized programs together is very much in the spirit of the unix approach to computing.
> CLI tools are not to be feared or considered somehow hacky.
I agree, you're on a *nix OS, calling a CLI tool should be a perfectly valid way to do something.
IMO the real issue is that Apple's built-in CLI tools aren't properly integrated with the rest of the system. Apple's curl used to use the same certificate store as the rest of the OS, then Apple changed it.
You're right, that was just the example I had on hand. Maybe a better example could be something like a video downloader that bundles yt-dlp, that could end up using this certificate store rather than the Apple APIs.