[Solved] Notes App: Apply Color to Selected Text?

Is there a way to change the color of selected text in Notes app?

read some forum entries, and it seems like Notes doesn't allow it, but, there's a Copy Style, and Paste and Retain Style, but haven't found a way to use them successfully.

Screen Shot 2020-12-10 at 5.36 PM

this won't work:

image

Weird...

You can use the color-picker.

C

And that can be automated to an extent.

As far as I can see it's NOT possible to use a saved clipboard to save a style and then use Paste-Style.

If you want this bad enough drop in on the Script Debugger Forum, and ask if it's possible to set the Syle-Pasteboard with AppleScriptObjC.

I can get styles to paste between TextEdit and Notes...

-Chris

Thanks @ccstone, thought about going the AppleScript route, maybe for v2 :slight_smile:

Had this itch, couldn't get out the idea of using a saved clipboard with a red style in it, so wrote this down, and when I got back to my computer it worked on almost my first attempt :smiley:

"Notes Style", just a simple red text:
Screen Shot 2020-12-11 at 9.03 AM

Macro:
image

Now if only text wrote itself ha!

Good deal.

That method didn't work for me on macOS 10.12.6 Sierra.

What macOS are you using?

And where did you grab the text swatch from?

-Chris

Worked on MacOS Catalina 10.15.7
Text swatch: grabbed it from Notes (added format to a text, copied to clipboard then pasted it as new in Preferences>Clipboard)

I just tried it out on my MacBook Air running Mojave, and it worked!

All I had to do was this:

Apply Style to Text in Notes.app v1.00.kmmacros (5.1 KB)

It worked on the selected text, and it worked if NO text was selected – so I could initiate a style with no text selected.

-Chris

1 Like

WHOA
this one is 10x much better

thanks!

1 Like

hmmm... oddly enough this macro stopped working after latest Catalina security update...

the previous convoluted one still works

Apple Notes: This is what is working for me, but I would love something simpler. I am trying to append a date stamp in apple notes and match the header size font size with lavender color. The "xmm" is a text expander snippet for date stamp of "// 03-26". So make sure to change the typed text to "// MM/DD".

Two Slashes, Date, and Color.kmmacros (682.9 KB)

The move and click macro will from time to time simply not work. Thus are there any other ways to do this?

I tried the above on BigSur | KBM 9.2 | Toggled Security, however, the clipboard style reverts any styling I add to clipboard history.

All of you are my heroes in how you are solving for these challenges.

Here is an image of my Move and Click Action.

seems like you need to add a Open Menu before the click:

image

Noob here, but how does that differ between the keyboard shortcut of "cmd+shift+c". Also, the menu item shifts (Show Colors / Hide Colors) based on if the color palate is already visible, so I do not know if the macro fails because of the menu item or how to diagnose. w/ cmd+shit+c at least it goes away and I can re-run the macro.

Thank you so much for your help @hello

I see, I use it to center-align text.

This macro below just pastes date and adds color to header:

Note: uploaded in Disabled state, you'll need to enable it

Two Slashes, Date, and Color.kmmacros (684.9 KB)

I disabled some actions, hopefully will be useful as a starting point

None of this seems to work in the Sonoma 14.4 version of Apple Notes anymore. The only way I can get Highlighting to work is with the macro below.

Highlight (Magenta).kmmacros (49.3 KB)
Image 2024-04-09 at 19.48

Anyone have a better idea? Ideally the "Apply Style to …" KM action would just work out of the box with Notes but it appears Notes has a restrictive text ingest layer (so people can paste web stuff in Notes) that messes with that action. It is possible to paste formatted text from Mail.app into Notes.app, however, so some formatting can be pasted in reliably. This might be related to Mail.app producing an public.html version on the clipboard, not just public.rtf.

Yes, @ccstone's method of loading a Named Clipboard into the System Clipboard and then using ⌥⌘V to paste just the Style from the Clipboard is no longer working in Sonoma 14.4

@hello's method of temporarily replacing selected text with a pasted Named Clipboard, copying the style from that text and then returning the text to what it was does still work (I found it needed one ⌘Z rather then two).

But one problem with both these methods is they replace the whole style including things like bold text.

So, your method of opening the Colour Picker and clicking on a colour seems the best at the moment. It feels like there should be a better way, but at least this method does just apply colour and keeps the rest of the formatting of the selected text.

I made a variation of your Macro that automatically opens the colour picker if it is not already open and clicks on an image of the actual colour (rather than a coordinate from the found image). There are two Found Image Actions in the Macro as the colour picker changes the image when the colour is selected and puts a grey background behind it. These two found images are set to not abort the Macro or notify on failure - so, whichever image is available is clicked on. Also, if you try this you might have to screen grab your own images and depending on your region use "color" instead of "colour" in the menu Actions.

Colour Magenta.kmmacros (63.2 KB)

Click to Show Image of Macro

Yeah, that works too.

Still, it would be FANTASTIC if KM could enhance the Apply Style to System Clipboard action to add a public.html version to the Clipboard. It seems that Notes ignores public.rtf but accepts HTML (and their insane com.apple.notes.richtext)…

Nudge :grinning: