contacts

contacts is a command line interface to Contacts in macOS. This used to be the Mac OS X Address Book.

Overview

contacts is a quick an easy way to search the OS X Address Book from the command line. An eventual goal is to fully replace the now unmaintained program of the same name. Functionality is currently limited to providing input for a mutt address query and for outputting alias and group entries for mutt.

Example Usage

contacts -m somename

This returns all matches for somename in your address book in a simple format:

name    email

contacts can also output alias and group entries for inclusion in your mutt rc file.See the man file for more detail.

contacts -a --all

Installing

Easy!

make
make install

Alternately, I'm working on getting this into homebrew, but for now you can install it from my github formula repository (beware of the other formula...).

brew install https://raw.github.com/tgray/homebrew-tgbrew/master/contacts2.rb

Dependencies

As of version 0.3.0, contacts is written in Swift. Building is via swift build, but it is all managed by the Makefile. There is one dependency that should be downloaded automatically. macOS 10.15 is listed as the minimum OS.

It should be known that I do not know what I am doing, so buyer beware.

Configuring

As of this time, there is no configuration.

tmux usage

This is not an exhaustive note on how to use with tmux, as I don't use tmux. However, some users have seen success with reattach-to-user-namespace. See https://github.com/ChrisJohnsen/tmux-MacOSX-pasteboard. I'd suggest installing via brew install reattach-to-user-namespace.

Other

As stated previously, eventually contacts will be a full fledged replacement for the other contacts. For now, it isn't. What it does do is intelligently search your Address Book and format the output so you can use it for the input of a mutt query call.

It is designed to be used with muttqt, a mutt query tool, which wraps contacts as well as manages other address query sources.

Developer Info

contacts is written by Tim Gray. It's obviously inspired by the other contacts.

The contacts homepage can be located on github at https://github.com/tgray/contacts.

Other contributors

• Sebastian Tramp - gave me the idea to also search companies.

License

contacts is released under an Apache License 2.0. Please see the LICENSE.markdown file included with the distribution.