One of the things that has been niggling me with MonoDevelop – and to be fair it’s more an issue with the Finder – is that by default it’s difficult to run multiple instances of it. It’s always useful to have more than one solution open when you want to compare or copy and paste code from one project to another.

A quick search on Stack Overflow found a nice simple solution, which involves kicking off the app from the terminal using -n to tell the Finder to run a new instance. But being lazy, I can’t be bothered typing stuff unnecessarily, so a quick solution is to wrap it in an AppleScript app wrapper.

Fire up Applications > Utilities > AppleScript Editor, type in:

do shell script “open -n /Applications/MonoDevelop.app”

Then select File > Save As, on the save dialog change the File Format to Application and save it somewhere safe (not in the applications folder), using the name MonoDevelop.

Then for a nice finishing touch, go back to the Applications folder and click on the MonoDevelop icon, press CMD + I to bring up the Get Info screen, click on the application icon in the top left of the screen and CMD + C to copy it.

Go back and find where you saved the AppleScript file, bring up the Get Info window with CMD + I, click on the application icon and paste in the MonoDevelop one with a CMD + V.

Then all you need to do is to drag the new AppleScript app to the Dock and you have a quick and easy way of firing up multiple instances of MonoDevelop.