Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'use the services menu?' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
use the services menu?
Authored by: osxpounder on Jun 30, '04 04:25:51PM

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.

---
--
osxpounder



[ Reply to This | # ]
use the services menu?
Authored by: gshenaut on Jun 30, '04 07:29:47PM

Yes, this is an esoteric thing. Lets take a trivial example. Suppose I
have typed in a bit of text which has a newline after each line:

The weapons of mass destruction
are buried under my statue.

and I discover I want to encrypt it. I can use my hint (copying it into
the paste buffer, processing it, and pasting it back). In this case, I'll
use "pbpaste | tr A-MN-Za-mn-z N-ZA-Mn-za-m | pbcopy" on a copy of
it to get this:

Gur jrncbaf bs znff qrfgehpgvba
ner ohevrq haqre zl fgnghr.

I suppose there are more impressive examples.

Unix is a very filtery operating system, and I think it's hand to have a
fairly easy to integrate that functionality with the GUI.

And I don't understand the Services comment either.

Greg Shenaut



[ Reply to This | # ]
use the services menu?
Authored by: Lankhmart on Jun 30, '04 08:54:53PM

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.



[ Reply to This | # ]
use the services menu?
Authored by: gshenaut on Jun 30, '04 10:13:11PM
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

[ Reply to This | # ]

Text Wielder
Authored by: zacht on Jul 01, '04 06:19:10AM

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.

For my part, I decided that it was interesting, but I don't use any of these things enough to justify trying to get used to using them. For those who use text filters and scripts more often, I hope this might be an interesting pointer.

zach



[ Reply to This | # ]