Sometimes I have styled text on the clipboard that I would like to put into a Markdown or HTML document. When I paste into any document, it appears as plain text stripped of any style info.
Is it possible for a Textmate bundle to capture the paste and transform the styled text to the syntax of the current buffer? E.g. styled text "This is bold and this has a link" would paste into a Markdown doc as "This is **bold** and this has a [link](http://example.com)" and into an HTML doc as "This is <b>bold</b> and this has a <a href='http://example.com/'>link</a>".
If this isn't possible, is anyone else interested in having this feature in Textmate or developing a system service for it?
Turadg Aleahmad PhD student http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~taleahma/, HCII http://hcii.cmu.edu
On 2011-02-26 17:48, Turadg Aleahmad wrote:
Is it possible for a Textmate bundle to capture the paste and transform the styled text to the syntax of the current buffer? E.g. styled text "This is bold and this has a link" would paste into a Markdown doc as "This is **bold** and this has a [link](http://example.com)" and into an HTML doc as "This is <b>bold</b> and this has a <a href='http://example.com/'>link</a>".
Very interesting suggestion. I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible for a bundle, so long as you could figure out how to access the clipboard. /usr/bin/pbpaste has an option to return RTF that was previously copied, but when I tried copying formatted text from Text Edit, pbpaste would only give me the plain ASCII. If you're lucky you'll be able to find a pre-built clipboard module for your favorite scripting language, or at worst you'd have to compile some C or Objective-C code to access the system APIs. Once you got the raw clipboard bytes you'd just have to parse the RTF and output it as the appropriate markup for the current document type.
Sounds cool. Let us know when it's done. :-)
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Steve King -
Turadg Aleahmad