GeekTool is a Mac OSX preference pane application that allows you to redirect the output from files, commands and images onto your Mac desktop. One nice nice trick is to use this to capture the lyrics from the currently playing track in iTunes and display them on the desktop. The command to do this is shown below

osascript -e ”’tell application “iTunes” to set currentLyrics to the lyrics of the current track”’

To set this up open GeekTool and click on the New Entry button then change the type of entry to Shell and paste the code above into the command window. Once you have done this move the text block on the desktop into a suitable position and resize as required. Finally set the font/size/colour/ to your personal preferences.

Click To See Screen Grab

When you fire up iTunes and start playing a track that has lyrics embedded they will be displayed on your desktop. Obviously you will need to get the lyrics into iTunes in the first place for this trick to be of any use. There are lots of Widgets around that can do this, the one I use personally is called TunesText

For examples of what can be done to prettify your desktop have a look at some of the screen grabs on Tynsoe.org.

If you have any good examples of scripts or uses for GeekTool please let me know.

Cheers