Personally, I’ve created a whole bunch of quick extensions for things I need to search for at work regularly – like usernames, domain names, and e-mail addresses. Simply plug in the site you want to search with the highlighted text, and this will spit out a PopClip ready extension for you to use. There’s a good tutorial here if you want to get down and dirty with AppleScript, but if you’re not ready for that yet, Brett again has created a fantastic wee tool to help you on your way. Custom SearchesĬan’t find what you are looking for on the list of 100+ free extensions on the PopClip page? No sweat. Great for capturing quick thoughts you want to come back to later. This will grab the select text and send it over to a new note in SimpleNote. I had been looking about for an extension that integrated with SimpleNote, but couldn’t find any. I ended up writing my own extension for this purpose, as the existing one on the PopClip page wasn’t producting great results. Not sure what an abbreviation means? WTF TLDR? Highlight and invoke this extension to get taken straight to the meaning. Just like CopyURLs, but this time it takes the URLs in the selected text and opens each of them in a new browser tab. If you just want CopyURLs though, you can grab it here. This beauty was authored by Brett, and is available to download as part of a bundle here. Simply highlight any text, invoke the extension, and just the URLs from that text will be copied to the clipboard. The CopyURLs extension did away with all of that in one quick swoop. Going through these, copying and pasting the URLs out separately was always a real fiddly, and boring task. Often I need to deal with long e-mails that have various URLs in them. Grabs the selected URL and shortens it using the Bit.ly service. The Google Translate extension grabs the selected text and passes it through to the full booner. Of course, sometimes there’s just too much text to display in one little popup. Saves the time and hassle of going to the Google translate page, instead bringing up the translation in a bubble:ĭownload Instant Translate here. Highlight a sentence, call up PopClip and hit Instant Translate to get a translation into the ‘Destination Language’ that you set in the preferences. The ones I use the most are: Instant Translate Here’s a glimpse at some of the extensions I have installed: There are a whole bunch of things you can use PopClip for, so it’s just a matter of finding what is useful for your own particular workflow. Alternatively, you can leave PopClip off, and trigger its menu when needed by the use of a hotkey – currently set to ⌘ + P. The latter is what I find myself using more often than not.Īs soon as I realised that I could do this, PopClip seemed a lot more powerful than before. Once installed, you can toggle PopClip ‘On’ or ‘Off’ by using the keyword popclip from the Alfred launch bar. I realised that rather than have the bar pop up every single time text was highlighted, Alfred could be used to control the behaviour through the use of Hotkeys.Īs a result I created an Alfred workflow specifically for this purpose. However, there were lots of cool features in there that I was sure would be useful at somepoint. The prospect of having the PopClip bar appear whenever I highlighted text seemed like it would become a real pain real quickly, and it did. It seemed like one of those cool ideas that didn’t really play out properly in execution. You can then quickly access a whole variety of different options, from the standard Bold/Italic formatting options, to looking up the text in the dictionary, Google translate, or whatever else you might fancy.Īt first, I wasn’t too convinced about this app. PopClip is a small helper application for Mac and iOS that pops up a control panel when you select text. One of the other tools that helps achieve this sort of inter-relationship for me was recommended by my friend and colleague Mark: PopClip for Mac. I’ve written before about how great Alfred is for this. That sort of harmony can be a really great feeling, and let you enjoy working rather than it becoming a chore. When you hit the sweet spot, your laptop really seems to sing doing exactly what you want to straight away without having to footer about and get bogged down in the drudgery it becomes almost like an extension of your fingers or brain. One of the benefits of working at Automattic is being surrounded by friendly, smart geeks who have tried all sorts of different things to get the most out of their computers, and to tailor them to fit how they work. Even if work itself is great, nobody likes having to do certain things… like copying and pasting different URLs into new browser tabs, or re-formatting garbled text. If you work online, there a whole load of tasks that can be a pain in the ass to have to do.
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