

Show HN: TextFlow – Automator workflows for text manipulation in OS X - vladdanilov
https://github.com/vmdanilov/TextFlow

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bshimmin
Goodness:
[https://github.com/vmdanilov/TextFlow/blob/master/Transform%...](https://github.com/vmdanilov/TextFlow/blob/master/Transform%20Selected%20Text%E2%80%A6.workflow/Contents/document.wflow)

XML wrapped around AppleScript, Perl, and some good old shell-scripting. What
a labour of love!

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vladdanilov
Thanks. I was walking on the edge with this one :)

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weslly
Automator is the most useful, powerful and underrated feature of OSX. It makes
me sad how almost nobody talks about it.

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Watabou
That and the related automation scripts. I would have thought that now that
they introduced Javascript for Automation (similar to Applescript), it would
be a lot more popular and would spur a lot of interest in creating workflows.

So far, I've not seen anything. I do use javascript for automation myself. A
useful "trick" is to write Javascript using Script Editor, save the script as
a .app file and place it in /Applications or similar and have Spotlight
execute that Script. I've done things like Empty Trash, Lock Screen, launching
a new Swift Playground (too many steps to do that with Xcode alone), quitting
all foreground apps, etc. Almost makes Spotlight act like Alfred or
Quicksilver.

I would really like to see what other people can come up.

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szymon_k
I do the same!

I have "dock" and "undock" apps for switching between mobile, and, ekhem,
docked state for my macbook (switching wifi, turning bluetooth on/off,
unomounting USB drive, etc).

I also have "move tabs to chrome", because I use safari for everyday and
chrome for dev, and sometimes I start something in safari and it turns out it
should be in chrome.

Also "Chrome Incognito" for quick incognito sessions (cmd-space, "incognito",
enter). Very useful!

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Watabou
Oh nice tip on the Incognito mode ;). I wonder if Safari has a flag like that
too.

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shill
Nice work. I use this automator for pretty printing JSON.

    
    
      import json
      import sys
    
      text = sys.stdin.read()
      try:
          print json.dumps(json.loads(text), sort_keys=False, indent=4)
      except Exception as e:
          print e

~~~
vladdanilov
Thank you. I thought on including some developer formatters. But decided it
should be left to code editors. In particular there is JSCS linter
([http://jscs.info/](http://jscs.info/)), or SublimeLinter-JSCS as Sublime
Text plugin ([https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeLinter-
jscs](https://packagecontrol.io/packages/SublimeLinter-jscs)) which can do
this and much more.

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dorian-graph
This is super useful! Thank you for making it. /installed

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calebm
The email extractor is super useful. I wrote a command-line script for doing
this, but will probably start using this instead.

