TouchDesigner on Mac OS X tries it’s best to only have 1 file open at a time. I say tries it’s best because there is a work around discussed here using TScript:
Currently if you have a file open in TouchDesigner it will try and close itself when you:
Try and start a new project
Try and open an existing project
This drawback makes some work flows quite difficult. I am new to TouchDesigner and it is very valuable to open up someone’s example files while I have my project open.
Yeah, its actually macOS trying its best to keep one instance running as part of its security. Unfortunately we haven’t found a solution for it yet but there is another way to launch new TD’s more easily than from a python script ui.viewFile(‘filepath’) inside TouchDesigner.
In the terminal you can use:
open -n /Applications/TouchDesigner099.app/
and it will launch a separate new TD. I like this approach because I can just use terminal history and open another one with 2 keystrokes.
We will keep looking for a better solution, thanks for your patience.
** EDIT: Scratched my own itch. Here’s code for an AppleScript application you can dock to let you launch a new instance + supports dropping an existing project file onto the app icon.
Still not a perfect solution, but I’ve been using that terminal command inside of a plain text file (saved with no extension) that I’ve made executable with the following command:
chmod 744 OpenNewTDInstance
Where “OpenNewTDInstance” is the name of the plain text file you saved, of course.
The advantage is that I can put it on my Dock and launch a new instance with a single click. I wish I could drop the project file that I wanted to open onto the icon— I believe this may be possible with an applescript app or droplet but I’ve yet to look into it further…
This is a great solution. I snagged the TouchDesigner.icns file from inside the TD app and added it as an icon to this AppleScript app for extra flare. :ugeek: