Clearing Growl Notifications
I use a notification system for OS X called Growl, which provides a single channel for various applications to use when they have something to tell me. I mainly use it for IM and email. I’m fairly happy with it, but one issue that irked me was dealing with clearing a bunch of the notifications off the screen.
You can set them to disappear on their own, but then you run the risk of missing them if you’re away from your keyboard, or if you just don’t happen to catch their content in time. So I set mine to all stay on the screen until they’re dismissed. In order to dismiss them, you either click to close each one individually, or you can restart Growl from the OS menu bar.
To do the latter, you more or less have to use the mouse, and that eventually began to annoy me. I looked around, and found that there was a commandline controller called growlctl, but that it was no longer included in Growl releases. It can be found in the Extras section of the Growl 0.7.6 release, though, which they still have available for download.
I downloaded that, installed it (which really just means moving it to somewhere on your path), and verified that it does indeed still work. I then created a rather simple script:
/usr/local/bin/growlctl restart
And put it in my homedir, calling it gr.sh. Quicksilver knows that it’s there, so now clearing the notifications requires, at most, the following keystrokes: <Ctrl-Space>gr<Enter>. Itch scratched.