CLI Apps Ls

`ed apps ls`

Prints the applications running on this Mac. It is the default subcommand, so ed apps on its own runs it, and list is an accepted alias.

ed apps ls [--json]

Options

Name	Type / values	Default	What it does
`--json`	flag	off	Emit JSON on stdout instead of the table. Long form only, there is no `-j`.
`--help`, `-h`	flag	off	Print the help for this command on stdout and exit 0.
`--version`	flag	off	Print the CLI version on stdout and exit 0. Inherited from the root command, so it works here too.

There is nothing else. ls has no search, no limit and no sort option: it prints every app it can see, in one order, every time.

The table is three columns, and the rows are sorted by name with a case-insensitive, locale-aware comparison:

$ ed apps ls
NAME        PID    BUNDLE
Dia         40466  company.thebrowser.dia
Edith       57385  com.pulkit.edith
Finder      612    com.apple.finder
Notion      60983  notion.id
Spotify     18719  com.spotify.client
WhatsApp    9226   net.whatsapp.WhatsApp
Wispr Flow  77028  com.electron.wispr-flow
Zed         49161  dev.zed.Zed

The list is NSWorkspace's running applications filtered to the ones whose activation policy is regular, which means the ones macOS gives a Dock icon and a menu bar to. Background daemons, launch agents and menu bar only apps are not in it, and neither is Edith's own menu bar helper, so the Edith row above is the main window process and never the helper that actually does the quitting. An app whose windows are all closed but which is still in the Dock is listed, despite the command's own one-line summary calling these the apps with a window open.

`--json` shape

A top-level array, in the same order as the table, of one object per app. This is a real document trimmed to three of the eight entries:

[
  {
    "active": true,
    "bundleID": "company.thebrowser.dia",
    "name": "Dia",
    "pid": 40466
  },
  {
    "active": false,
    "bundleID": "com.apple.finder",
    "name": "Finder",
    "pid": 612
  },
  {
    "active": false,
    "bundleID": "dev.zed.Zed",
    "name": "Zed",
    "pid": 49161
  }
]

What the fields mean:

name is the app's localized name, the same string the Dock and the Finder show. An app that reports no name gets "" rather than null, so the key is always a string.
bundleID is the bundle identifier, and it is null rather than missing when the process has none. It is the only nullable field here.
pid is the process id as an integer, which is what the helper is handed when you quit a single app.
active is true for the frontmost app and false for every other, so exactly one entry is true while any app is focused and none is while focus sits with something the list does not cover.
The BUNDLE column of the table is bundleID, printed as an empty cell where the JSON says null. The table has no column for active.

Object keys are sorted, so active, bundleID, name and pid always come in that order. The array itself keeps the name order, not a sorted-key order.

Examples

ed apps ls
ed apps ls --json
ed apps ls --json | jq -r '.[] | select(.active) | .name'
ed apps ls --json | jq -r '.[] | "\(.pid) \(.name)"'

Behaviour notes

Nothing is mutated and nothing is written. Neither the Edith app nor the menu bar helper has to be running, no macOS permission is involved, and no subprocess is launched, so this never exits 4 and never blocks.

Every cell is flattened before it is printed: newlines, carriage returns and tabs become spaces, and other control characters are dropped, so a hostile app name cannot break the table across lines. Column widths are counted in characters, which means a name carrying an invisible mark such as a left-to-right override still occupies a column of width the eye does not see, and its row can look a character out of line.

ed apps ls and the app's Running apps card read the same process list but present it differently. The card measures CPU and memory per process and sorts by CPU descending by default; ed measures neither and always sorts by name. For per-process CPU on this Mac use ed system stats --processes <n>, which covers every process rather than only the ones with a Dock icon.