That works quite well, and I used it for a while, but even though it is supposed to be entirely client side, I still would prefer not to be pasting anything non-public.
I think the biggest improvement would be if someone had an Apple developer account and could go through the notarization process so that it could be easy to install. Probably also with bundling pandoc. And it would be nice to get it into the Mac app store.
In terms of the functionality of the actual tool, the markdown it produces has more escaping than I would like. Several special characters seem to be always escaped, to be on the safe side, when instead they could be escaped only when necessary.
I like both logos individually, but they don't look quite right next to each other. I think this should also be moot, though, because two apps is silly. Better to have a single menu bar app, with two clicks, one for markdown and another for normalization.
Instead of modifying the paste buffer, it would be nice to have a key combination for "apply the transformation and paste". This one might not be possible, though perhaps it could be faked by modifying the buffer, pasting, and then restoring the buffer, very quickly.
The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but I want comfortable text:
Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:
If I do Cmd+Shift+V and paste without formatting, I get no styling at all:
I can deal with losing the blockquote formatting, but losing the links is a pain.
What I want is essentially the subset of HTML that can be represented in Markdown. So I automated this! I made a Mac command that pulls HTML from the clipboard, passes it through pandoc twice (HTML to Github-flavored markdown to HTML), and puts it back on the clipboard. I also packaged it up as a status-bar app:
You can run it by clicking on the icon, or invoking the script:
Which gives:
Alternatively, if I actually want Markdown, perhaps to paste into an LLM interface, I can skip the conversion to HTML:
I'm pretty happy with this! It's open source, on github, so you're welcome to give it a try if it would be useful to you.
Note that I haven't paid for an Apple Developer subscription, so if you want to use the pre-built binaries you'll need to click through scary warnings in both your browser and the OS. I've documented these in the README, though an advantage of building from source is that you don't have to deal with these.
This was my first time using Platypus to package a script as a Mac app. It worked well!
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