{"id":17055,"date":"2017-01-30T12:56:50","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T17:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=17055"},"modified":"2017-01-30T22:22:03","modified_gmt":"2017-01-31T03:22:03","slug":"processing-the-selected-text-via-script","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/30\/processing-the-selected-text-via-script\/","title":{"rendered":"Processing the Selected Text via Script"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems like it should be easy to run the selected text in any app through a shell script, but I’ve run into a surprising number of issues doing this. I’ve long used ThisService<\/a> to create system services out of shell scripts that sort lines, smarten quotes, and apply title case. Then I would assign keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences and have easy access to the scripts from any app.<\/p>\n

Over the last few months, keyboard shortcuts for system services (and PDF services) have become unreliable. They still show up in System Preferences, but they usually don’t work. Often, System Preferences forgets them. It also forgets which services I’ve enabled and disabled, hiding my favorite scripts and bringing back dozens of commands that I never use. This makes the Services contextual menu unwieldy. The Keyboard preferences pane is awkward to use, so that it takes a long time to go through the list checking and unchecking the appropriate boxes.<\/p>\n

My first thought was to use LaunchBar, which I knew could get and replace the selected text (either using a script<\/a> or a service<\/a>). However, this takes multiple steps: long Command-Space to load the text, Tab, type the name of the script\/service, Command-Shift-C to copy the result text and paste it back. This is fine for occasionally used scripts, where keyboard shortcuts would not be practical, but not for ones I use many times per day.<\/p>\n

How about using FastScripts<\/a> to assign keyboard shortcuts and run the scripts? Unfortunately, most applications are not scriptable enough to access the selected text. I wrote a script to use GUI scripting to invoke my service from the Services menu:<\/p>\n\n

my runServiceNamed(\"Title Case\")\n\non runServiceNamed(_serviceName)\n    tell application \"System Events\"\n        set _frontApp to first application process whose frontmost is true\n        tell _frontApp\n            set _appMenu to menu 2 of menu bar 1\n            set _servicesMenu to menu 1 of menu item \"Services\" of _appMenu\n            set _menuItem to menu item _serviceName of _servicesMenu\n            click _menuItem\n        end tell\n    end tell\nend runServiceNamed<\/pre>\n\n
However, GUI scripting the menu bar doesn’t seem to work in MarsEdit, one of the apps where I would use the scripts most frequently.<\/p>\n\n
I ended up giving up on services entirely and used GUI scripting and the clipboard to get and set the selected text:<\/p>\n
my process(\"\/Users\/mjt\/Library\/Application Support\/BBEdit\/Text Filters\/titlecase.py\")\n\non process(_scriptPath)\n    set _savedClipboard to the clipboard\n\n    -- Copy selected text\n    tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke \"c\" using {command down}\n    delay 1 -- Without this, the clipboard may have stale data.\n\n    -- Clipboard has Mac line breaks, but script requires Unix.\n    set _script to \"pbpaste | tr '\\\\r' '\\\\n'  | \" & _scriptPath's quoted form & \" | pbcopy\"\n    do shell script _script\n\n    -- Paste to replace selected text\n    tell application \"System Events\" to keystroke \"v\" using {command down}\n    delay 1 -- Without this, may restore clipboard before pasting.\n\n    set the clipboard to _savedClipboard\nend process\n<\/pre>\n
This is ugly and has some downsides: there are delays necessitated by the GUI scripting, and certain types of clipboard data are not preserved. But I can assign a single keyboard shortcut, which FastScripts won’t forget, and it works reliably.<\/p>\n
Note: I originally wrote the script to use the clipboard<\/code> instead of pbcopy<\/code> and pbpaste<\/code>. The latter are better because that way the text doesn’t end up in an AppleScript variable. Getting the text from AppleScript into stdin seems to require using either echo<\/code>, which is subject to the shell’s command length limit, or writing to a temporary file.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems like it should be easy to run the selected text in any app through a shell script, but I’ve run into a surprising number of issues doing this. I’ve long used ThisService to create system services out of shell scripts that sort lines, smarten quotes, and apply title case. Then I would assign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[159,650,131,125,467,30,1381,1470],"class_list":["post-17055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-applescript","tag-applescriptobjc","tag-bug","tag-keyboardshortcuts","tag-launchbar","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-12","tag-system-services"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17055"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17056,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055\/revisions\/17056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}