Replacement for SubEthaEdit's Command Line Tool

The see command line tool for SubEthaEdit makes scripting needlessly complex. Because it tries to write the contents of the document to stdout upon close of the document, you wind up having to jump through hoops to get sensible behavior. The end result is that it is easy to write an AppleScript where SubEthaEdit calls out to the shell, but hard to have the shell communicate back to SubEthaEdit.

Here, I present an alternative. It is a shell script that uses osascript to open a document in SubEthaEdit. Optionally, a specific line can be given, and, if UI scripting is enabled, the document will be scrolled to show the line.

#!/bin/sh

PROGRAM=$(basename $0)

usage()
{
    echo "Usage: $PROGRAM [-gh] filename"
}

lineGiven=false
while getopts :g:h opt
do
    case $opt in
    g)      lineGiven=true
            lineToShow="$OPTARG"
            ;;
    h)      usage
            exit 0
            ;;
    '?')    echo "$PROGRAM: invalid option -$OPTARG" >&2
            usage >&2
            exit 1
            ;;
    esac
done

shift $((OPTIND - 1))

fileName="$1"

if [ -f "$fileName" ]
then
    Dir="$(dirname "$fileName")"
    Base="$(basename "$fileName")"
    AbsDir="$(cd "$Dir" && pwd -P)"
    AbsPath="$AbsDir/$Base"
else
    echo "Unknown file: $fileName" >&2
    exit 1
fi

echo $AbsPath

/usr/bin/osascript > /dev/null <<ASCPT
    set fileToOpen to POSIX file "$AbsPath"

    if $lineGiven then
        showLine of fileToOpen at ${lineToShow:-0}
    else
        tell application "SubEthaEdit"
            activate
            open fileToOpen
        end tell
    end if

    to showLine of fileToOpen at lineNumber
        tell application "SubEthaEdit"
            activate
            set activeFile to open fileToOpen
            tell activeFile
                set selection to paragraph lineNumber
            end tell
        end tell
        scrollToVisible()
    end showLine

    to scrollToVisible()
        tell application "System Events"
            if UI elements enabled then
                tell process "SubEthaEdit"
                    tell menu bar 1
                        tell menu bar item "Find"
                            tell menu 1
                                click menu item "Jump to Selection"
                            end tell
                        end tell
                    end tell
                end tell
            end if
        end tell
    end scrollToVisible
ASCPT