This week our guest is Bart Busschots with an installment of something he’s calling Programming By Stealth-adjacent. It’s not part of the regular series of Programming By Stealth, and yet it’s not technically very “light” in terms of the chit chatting. Since neither podcast is the right place for it, I’ve decided to put it in both podcast feeds to be wrong twice.
Bart walks us through how to create Quick Actions with Automator (also known as Services) to do some simple but very useful text manipulations using a smidge of JavaScript. Even if you don’t want to write these Quick Actions yourself, you can download his services from his Github repo where he’s put them up as open source: https://github.com/bbusschots/macos-quickaction-text.
You can see how Bart created this in his blog post at www.bartbusschots.ie/…
Fantastic podcast. Just the information I have been looking for.
I have used Automator before for small projects but confess I have not been following PBS so am wondering what would be the Javascript command to convert a string to italics. Browsing Javascript string properties does not provide n immediate answer.
I tried commenting on Bart’s site but after entering my name and email address it would not provide a field for comments.
Yeah, Bart’s comments Brooke awhile ago and he hasn’t made three time to fix them. The command you’re looking for is explained here:
https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_italics.asp
If that doesn’t make sense, shot me an email with what you’ve got so far and I’ll help you with it. It would be great fun for me to be able to help someone else with JavaScript!
Strike that! The jQuery method .italics() described in that link is deprecated!
Can you tell me your use case, Trevor? Might help with developing a solution. Obviously ⌘-I exists for regular text editing so you must need it for some other condition.
Thanks Allison, EVERYBODY uses command-i, I wanted to try something nerdy.
I had tried using .italics() and found it just appended the HTML code before and after the string. I don’t have a specific use case apart from trying to help one of my Apple User Group members with a problem he had last year. He already listens to Bart’s Lets-Talk Apple, so I have sent him a link to this Podcast too in case he is one of the few who missed me recommending your fantastic suite of Podcasts.
Yeah, Trevor, that’s exactly what .italics() does. I even played with making one that puts on either side (which means emphasis and is the new italics) which works but it all depends on your use case of course. Glad you’re getting sucked into the madness!