How to add an “Open in VS Code” icon in macOS Finder

Jan 28, 2023

Learn how to add an Open in VS Code button to the macOS Finder toolbar using an Automator app that runs a shell script with osascript and the open command.

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Let’s say I’m in the Finder, I open a folder and I want to open it in VS Code.

What do I do? I typically move to the parent, grab that folder, and drop it into the VS Code icon in the Dock.

Or I go to the terminal and type code .

But today I invested some time into making this process much easier, with a button in the Finder toolbar:

Here’s how you can do that too.

Open Automator. Pick “Application”

Search for “Run Shell Script” in the list of actions, and paste these 2 lines:

finderPath=`osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to get the POSIX path of (target of front window as alias)'`
open -n -a "Visual Studio Code" --args "$finderPath"

If you prefer you can use the bundle ID of the app:

finderPath=`osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to get the POSIX path of (target of front window as alias)'`
open -n -b "com.microsoft.VSCode" --args "$finderPath"

The first runs osascript (which is a script to run AppleScript) with the following AppleScript

tell application "Finder" to get the POSIX path of (target of front window as alias)

which basically gets the current opened folder absolute path.

Then we assign that to the shell variable finderPath and we use that with the open command to tell VS Code to open that folder.

Save this application in the Applications folder and then click Get info to change its icon.

You can open Get info on VS Code too, and drag the VS Code icon to the top-left small icon to assign that icon to our new little app.

Finally keep the ⌘ command key pressed and drag the app in the Finder toolbar.

That’s it!

Tagged: Mac · All topics

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