How do I ask where someone is?

Goal

Ask Nova where a person is who shares their location with you in Find My.

Before you start

• The person shares their location with you in Apple’s Find My app.
• Expert view. The switch is in How do I switch between Simple and Expert?
• For an answer with a place, the findmy program. It comes from Homebrew: brew install omarshahine/tap/findmy-cli.

Steps

1. Settings, Calendar & briefing, the Advanced tab. The card Find My is at the top.
2. In the field, one line per person: Alias = person name. On the left is the word you say. On the right is the name as it appears in Find My.
3. People on the Household card under Profile & family, tab People, need no alias. Their name or the relationship is enough, for example “my wife”.
4. In the field findmy CLI path (optional), enter the full path, for example /opt/homebrew/bin/findmy. Empty, Nova looks for findmy in the PATH only.
5. Ask at the avatar. Nova opens Find My, reads the place through findmy, and tells you.
6. Without findmy, Nova opens Find My and types the name into its search. You read the place yourself.
7. Nova writes nothing and sends nothing out. There is no card for this.

Example

Enter the line Dad = Thomas Muster. Then: “Where is Dad right now?”

Common problems

• Nova says macOS permissions are missing. findmy needs Screen Recording and Accessibility. See Which macOS permissions does Nova need?
• Nova says the name was not found. The name right of the = must match Find My.
• With several names on the right, Nova only looks for the first.
• If one line has no =, Nova does not take the list and keeps the old one.
• Simple does not show the Advanced tab.