open new tab in iTerm and execute command there

Question

I have found way to open new tab in iTerm:

newtabi()
{
    osascript -e 'tell application "iTerm" to activate' -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTerm" to keystroke "t" using command down'
}

And I want to execute some commands in new tab. Let it be simple command pwd. How to do it?

If I run ...

newtabi && pwd

The new tab is opened as expected, but pwd command is executed not in new tab but in old one, where I typed newtabi && pwd

I use zsh. My os is OS X 10.8.5

Answer 1

Use tell session -1 of current terminal to write text "pwd":

activate application "iTerm"
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "t" using command down
tell application "iTerm" to tell session -1 of current terminal to write text "pwd"

Answer 2

osascript \
-e 'tell application "iTerm" to activate' \
-e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTerm" to keystroke "t" using command down' \
-e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTerm" to keystroke "ls"' \
-e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "iTerm" to key code 52'

Answer 3

As of at least macos Mojave, iTerm 3.2.8, if you run:

$ open -a iTerm .

It will add it as a tab to the current window.

Answer 4

I couldn't get the accepted answer to work. I also wanted to pass multiple commands. This is what I came up with.

newtabi(){  
  osascript \
    -e 'tell application "iTerm2" to tell current window to set newWindow to (create tab with default profile)'\
    -e "tell application \"iTerm2\" to tell current session of newWindow to write text \"${@}\""
}

Example usage

newtabi pwd
newtabi 'cd ~/ && pwd'
newtabi 'echo \"Hello New Tab\"'

For more complex actions, I would recommend breaking up the commands.

code_folder="/path/to/code"

alias project="cd ${code_folder}/my-project/foo && yarn run start"

Then, newtabi project