Hmm, I am not sure I agree.

I'd say spotify start would be in line with the current approach, as there is already spotify quit.
Or something along the lines of spotify play --startifnotstarted?

Again, I am not sure I agree.

I do agree with your narrow case in the issue where spotify status starts it up when it should probably just tell you it is not started. But I want to be able to type spotify play and just have it do the right thing and not have me say something like --really-start-if-not-already-started

Your argument is understandable. What would you think should be the right behaviour for spotify quit?

1. Start Spotify, Stop, Quit Spotify
2. Exit 0

Exit 0.

So we need to figure out how to do this in a way that is right for each command, and I am guessing spotify play (and its variants) is the only case where we want it to magic start.

I can agree to that :) I'll see if I can whip something up on the weekend.

Thank you 👍

Would a good compromise be to include something like an AUTOSTART variable in the config file? Something like this:

# original line: https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify/blob/c93a1e939a7f3260fefe8ed2537733c89d88caee/spotify#L29
USER_CONFIG_DEFAULTS="CLIENT_ID=\"\"\nCLIENT_SECRET=\"\"\nSPOTIFY_AUTOSTART=1";

and

# https://github.com/hnarayanan/shpotify/blob/c93a1e939a7f3260fefe8ed2537733c89d88caee/spotify#L153-L156
    if [ $(osascript -e 'application "Spotify" is running') = "false" ]; then
        if [ "$SPOTIFY_AUTOSTART" -eq 0 ]; then
            echo "Spotify not starting automatically. Exiting."
            exit 1
        fi

        osascript -e 'tell application "Spotify" to activate' || exit 1
        sleep 2
    fi

Note the default is to autostart spotify (author's preference), but in this way a user can choose to explicitly have to open Spotify.

From what I can tell, the following lines are unnecessary:

if [ $(osascript -e 'application "Spotify" is running') = "false" ]; then
        osascript -e 'tell application "Spotify" to activate' || exit 1
        sleep 2
fi

Spotify does NOT need to be running in order for it to respond to apple script requests; it will launch automatically and respond to the apple script. I suggest that you remove this section. Also, with this section included, if Spotify is not running before I enter a command, when I run a command it will launch and become the frontmost application. I don't like having the Spotify window launch and filling up my screen when I can just control it from the command line. After commenting out the above section, when I run a command, Spotify launches, but stays hidden. If, for some reason, I'm wrong, at the very least Spotify can be launched hidden via the following terminal command: open -a Spotify -j

Edit: some more info about open -a Spotify -j
-a specifies that the following argument is the name of an application to open
-j launches the application hidden
run man open for more information

Please look up git blame and when this code was added/changed. I don't have strong opinions on this and either (a) I did something wrong (most likely) or (b) someone added this code because their pet case didn't work out.

I'd forgotten but apparently that was me to solve #73

@Peter-Schorn i added that line at some point to address the (admittedly odd) edge case of a weird error message if Spotify.app wasn't installed at all.

I think your open solution works much better though.

I just created a python script that allows you to play Spotify songs directly from spotlight search on macOS! Check it out here