Text Processing
As a native macOS app, MarkEdit works with system services seamlessly, please check out the official user manual from Apple. If you're already familiar with similar workflows in TextEdit, there's no difference.
Note that, this also means that what we learned from this page works for all decent text editing apps on macOS.
Here we are introducing how could we add services easily by leveraging the Shortcuts app, taking changing text to upper case as an example:
By enabling Service Menu and Provide Output, this shortcut will appear in the system service menu and can replace the selected text, we can also set up a keyboard shortcut so that we don't need to rely on right-click.
This example is extremely simple, the "processing" part is just converting the input to upper case. Luckily, Shortcuts is super powerful, there are tons of advanced actions, such as sending HTTP requests and parsing responses. We can even run scripts to further unlock possibilities.
Note that, you can trigger the Shortcuts from both the contextual menu with text selections, and from the main menu without text selections.
As mentioned above, Shortcuts can do lots of things magically, so why not integrate it with some nice openai APIs to build an AI assistant?
You're the lucky one! The community has built some great ones, such as Summarize, Improve readability, Translate, you can learn more from this post: How to use Apple Shortcuts to integrate GPT-3 in macOS and iOS.
Please check the Shortcuts before running, as they send requests to a server, which may cause potential privacy issues.
As a conclusion, we really don't need to build text processing features inside MarkEdit. Instead, we will keep MarkEdit a good macOS citizen, and leverage system services as much as possible.