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use the services menu
What you are talking about is exactly what the apple services menu is for. look under the menu item ajacent to the apple menu (i.e. the menu titles wit the name of the app). See the services menu. that's how those work.
use the services menu?
I read this hint, and SOX's comment, but I have to confess I still don't know what the heck either of you are talking about. It's not important -- I guess if I didn't know about it, and I still don't understand, I probably don't have a pressing need to know. Just curious, especially by SOX's comment, because I see nothing on the Services menu that seems related to the hint.
use the services menu?
Yes, this is an esoteric thing. Lets take a trivial example. Suppose I
use the services menu?
With SilverService, you can turn any arbitrary shell command or script into a system-wide service. For instance: I entered your "tr" command into SilverService, and now I can highlight some text in any Service-aware application, go to Services-->SilverService-->ROT13 and the text will be transformed right in place without any need to pipe from and to the clipboard.
use the services menu?
Yeah, I tried that with Platypus but it didn't work. It was as if the paste buffer was cleared when the embedded script started up. Maybe SilverService is smarter about that than Platypus.
And, I like the way goes into the services menu. Very interesting. I'm going to give it a try, thanks. Greg Shenaut
Text Wielder
Versiontracker has some beta software called "Text Wielder" which seems to consist mainly of a bunch of text-manipulating scripts to be used as Services. You can modify the included scripts or add your own.
Consider "TextExtras"
I also loved old "vi"'s ability to use any filter, in the manner gshenaut described. I used to miss that on the GUI editors.
Consider "TextExtras"
OK, I really like TextExtras. But there are a couple issues I have with it: first, the Command-| hotkey didn't work, I don't know why. I finally figured out how to make a "User Scripts" menu to show up on the menu bar, and that's OK. Second, I didn't really like their pipeline command too much--there are too many options on it, it won't use the user's default shell, and it doesn't display error messages. So, here's my version of the pipeline command, called "aaafilter.sh" (the "aaa" is so it goes at the top of the menu):
It does more or less the same thing as the built-in pipeline, but to me it seems more convenient. You have to have CocoaDialog for it to work.
Greg Shenaut
Full circle
OK, this is great stuff. First, on the aaafilter.sh script I posted previously, it may be necessary to insert code to set the PATH to something other than the default, or otherwise initialize the shell, to let it see all the possible filter commands you want to run. On my system, I can do ". /etc/profile" in the script for this, but YMMV.
Second, I made this little script, which I call "xvi":
which, if typed into the filter window will start up vi on the selected text in an X window. When you write it out, the result will replace the selected text. You could use your favorite editor instead of vi if you want.
Bottom line: with this trick, you can now use any editor you want to edit text in GUI programs like Mail.app, TextEdit, and so on, and you can do all the text filtering you want. Cheers, Greg Shenaut |
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