Possible to send selected text on a webpage to any installed app?

[Sridhar Katakam]

I would like to select some text on a webpage, press a hotkey and send it as input to apps that accept text input.

 

Ex.: Select the text "enqueue" on a page, press ⌥⌘\ and when Alfred comes up, start typing "das" and when Dash appears in the list, hit return to search my selection in Dash.

 

Ideally I should not have to hard-code or specify Dash to some list manually but should be able to send to any installed app.

 

Is this possible?

 

Thanks in advance.

[vitor]

58 minutes ago, Sridhar Katakam said:

Ideally I should not have to hard-code or specify Dash to some list manually but should be able to send to any installed app.

 

Is this possible?

Nope. You can’t just send text (or anything else) to an app; they have to understand the message.

 

You’ll have to do it individually per app, and not every app will support it. You might have to send keypresses to some, which is error-prone and far from ideal.

[Sridhar Katakam]

Pity. I'll continue to use LaunchBar alongside Alfred for its Instant Send feature then.

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, Sridhar Katakam said:

Pity. I'll continue to use LaunchBar alongside Alfred for its Instant Send feature then.

 

Or you could try to explain what it is you're actually asking for …

 

Like Vítor says, you can't just "send text" to an app. Launchbar is doing something specific, and you – the person who uses Launchbar – are going to have to tell us – the people who use Alfred – what that is before we can tell you how to do it in Alfred. I mean, it's not really reasonable to expect us to go download & install Launchbar, then figure out what its Instant Send feature does just to answer your question, is it?

 

So how does Instant Send actually work? Does it perhaps just set the Find pasteboard and then activate an application? Does it do something different depending on what's selected and/or which app you choose?

Edited August 8, 2021 by deanishe

[Sridhar Katakam]

Sure.

 

Example 1

 

Let's say I want to share some text on a webpage with someone. With LaunchBar, I can select the text, press a designated hotkey (⌥ in my case) and have it invoke LB with the selected text.

 

 

Then I begin typing the name of any app installed on my computer to which I can send text - in this case, Droplr and hit return to have the ready-to-be-shared URL in the clipboard.

 

 

Example 2

 

Let's say I am writing some code in Sublime Text and I wanted to read more about a particular function. I select the function name, press ⌥ and begin typing 'd' and hit ↵ to send it to Dash where I can look up its documentation or in Google etc.

 

 

 

 

https://nostodnayr.net/2019/05/summon-and-send

[deanishe]

On 8/9/2021 at 2:18 AM, Sridhar Katakam said:

any app installed on my computer to which I can send text

 

So it isn’t actually any app like you originally said.

 

This appears to be some built-in actions + macOS services. Alfred doesn't currently support macOS services natively, so you'll have to use a workflow to run macOS Services (I think that's the only workflow for macOS services).