Adding Content to Front and Back of Selection

[ixium]

I am looking to create a workflow that does this..

 

 

if I had some text on a page like this....

 

Test Text

 

And I select that text, then use a keyword or shortcut, it would apply <strong> before and </strong> after

 

I have already set something up like this but it requires me to cut the text out, use my keyword, paste the text into alfred and then it will apply the styling.

 

Is there anyway to make alfred do this without having to cut it and paste it back in?

 

 

[deanishe]

Is there anyway to make alfred do this without having to cut it and paste it back in?

 

 

Yes and no.

 

It's trivially easy to tell Alfred to use the current text selection via a Keyword object.

 

However, there's no reasonable way to replace that selection without using the pasteboard.

[dfay]

Here's a more detailed description of how to set this up - this still relies on the clipboard but it doesn't affect clipboard history, and allows to select text and hit a hotkey rather than going through the manual steps you describe:

 

create a new blank workflow

 

add a hotkey, and select Action: Pass through to workflow and Argument: Selection in OS X

 

add a run script action with the following config set in the dropdowns:

 

Language: /bin/bash

with input as argv

 

for the script you can use

query=$1

echo -n "<strong>"$query"</strong>"

Then add a Copy to Clipboard action with {query} in the text box and both checkboxes below checked.

 

then connect them all and add your hotkey

[ixium]

Thank you so much both of you, this worked! Thank you, thank you!

[ixium]

Follow up question, Id like to do the same thing with H1 and styling, but the " are throwing it off

 

query=$1

 

echo -n "<h1 style="font-size: 22px; color:black;">"$query"</h1>"

 

what would I need to change?

[deanishe]

Escape the inner quotation marks.

 

echo -n "<h1 style=\"font-size: 22px; color:black;\">$query</h1>"

[ixium]

thank you so much! you guys rock

[leefur]

On 6/22/2016 at 4:32 PM, dfay said:

add a hotkey, and select Action: Pass through to workflow and Argument: Selection in OS X

 

 

Any way to do this but via a keyword instead of a hotkey? I'm trying to tweak your excellent Case Converter workflow so that I can select some text, then call up Alfred and type "case" and have it drop down a list of my options, or maybe just type "sentence case" (eventually just "se" would do it) to go right to that option. There are only so many hotkeys I can remember…

[dfay]

Good Q.  As far as I can tell there's no way to have a keyword act on selected text.  You'd need to copy to the clipboard first and paste in the text.

 

I'll add it as a feature suggestion b/c it would be useful.

 

BTW I semi-resolved the hotkey issue by writing this workflow which will list all hotkeys: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/4384-workflow-picker/