I love that the Internet is full of smart people making and sharing awesome things. Like Dr. Drang and his Tidying Markdown Reference Links script. Seth Brown’s formd is another great tool I don’t know how I ever lived without. But, being the amateur that I am, I always struggle to figure out just how to use the scripts these amazing programmers have been kind enough to provide.
Lucky for me (and you), I’m able to play along with the help of everyone’s favorite writing tool, TextExpander. In the documentation for formd, Seth was gracious enough to spell it out for us laypersons[1].
To run formd with TextExpander, simply place the Markdown text to convert onto the clipboard and issue the appropriate TextExpander shortcut (I use fr or fi for referenced or inline, respectively).
It took longer than I’d like to admit, but eventually I realized this snippet could be tweaked to run any script I happen to download from a coder more skilled than myself. Additionally, since most of the scripts I want to use are built for processing text, the copy/paste activation generally works great.
With this short snippet, I can copy my text to be processed, invoke the script snippet of my choosing, and have the results immediately pasted back into my text editor, email, or wherever.
This particular snippet assumes you’re running a python script, but you can just as easily swap python for ruby or perl. Or you can omit the python call if you’re just running a standard Bash command. As long as it’s a valid command that would run in the Terminal[2], you can automate it this way. And, just as with formd, to use the snippet, you simply Copy the text to be processed, and invoke the snippet.
Boom. Done. Life is grand.
While none of this is new or revolutionary, connecting the dots between TextExpander and the Terminal is something I wish I’d have discovered long ago and, therefore, may be of interest to you.
Of course none of this would be possible without the amazing minds that write the scripts in the first place. So, along with this post, I offer a sincere Thank You to Dr. Drang and his site And now it’s all this, as well as Seth Brown and his site Dr. Bunsen.
