With Yoink, a great little app in the App Store recommended by @appleianer, it is possible to store files, text, images etc temporarily in a small Yoink sidebar and retrieve the data when needed.
One disadvantage is that is requires the user to drag and drop the information into yoink (snapshot below) which is a bit time consuming. It would be easier to simply copy data to the clipboard and send to Yoink.
There is a built in way to do this, but is a bit tedious : the user must right click in a small yoink window.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post as well as the link.
screenshot: I took your advice and found a solution which works fine using Alfred which is said to be faster than automator for this task. https://github.com/Irvel/screenshot-to-yoink
I am left with 2 issues: a- copying files b- copying text +/- images (RTF ?) into Yoink.
1- copying files:
The instructions are
To send a file from Terminal.app to Yoink, you can use this command: open -a Yoink /path/to/the/file
If I want to send the file /Users/jlette111/Downloads/test.markdown to Yoink, what would my Terminal command be?
2- Concerning KBM:
which action do I use to run a terminal command ?
what actions would I use to convert clipboard content to a RTF file? I had a look at Set System Clipboard to Styled Text “” but am confused. I tested RTF files and they work, with the advantage of containing both text and images.
I am sure that you are busy and understand perfectly if you don’t have time to reply. Thanks again and have a nice day.
The answer to the latter is "Execute a Shell Script", but there's no need to use it, or terminal commands at all. Just use the "Open a File, Folder, or Application" action to open the file with Yoink. In the example you give, you could send the file like this:
You can also use this action in conjunction with the For Each action to add any currently selected file(s) to Yoink like this:
There is not, because Yoink is not scriptable. As far as I can tell, the best you can do to add clipboard content without writing to a file is to invoke that "Add from Clipboard" command automatically. This can be done either with KM's mouse clicking action, or with UI scripting, although in my testing the latter was (surprisingly) much slower than the latter (though it does have the distinct advantage of not needing to set the mouse coordinates every time the window changes size or position) followed by inserting text via typing followed by "Return" to select the command. This quick proof-of-concept macro includes both ways, with the more reliable but slower UI script way enabled by default (just as well, since you'd need to change the mouse clicking action to your setup anyway). I found I got better results by having the mouse target the gear icon with a left click rather than anywhere in the window with a right click:
Thanks very very much for your post.
I am working on it step by step.
The problem of sending both files and screenshots to Yoink is solved.
The remaining objective concerns the clipboard: both to append to Yoink and also fix an irritant of Yoink which is that it accepts only text from the clipboard with the add from clipboard function: images and links are lost.
Hence, my idea of clipboard ➜ RTF file ➜ add RTF file to Yoink.
Problems with my macro attempt below:
The action below assumes that a Yoink Temp.rtf file exists.
Is there a way to create a new Yoink Temp.rtf RTF file each time, and delete that file at the end of the macro?
thank you
Very interesting. Thank you very much for the video and the explanation,
I purchased Copied. You always have excellent recommendations.
If I follow your video correctly:
display copied window ➜ choose clip ➜ activate copied palette ➜ choose Yoink ➜ choose clipboard
There are a few things I do not understand.
since Copied has no menu, I assume that your palette macros are simply the Copied shortcuts ?
I do not understand your palette triggers: what does the Yoink trigger/macro do ? What does the Clipboard trigger/macro do ?
I must say that I also like the fact that the Yoink window is a discrete sidebar on the side of the screen, whereas the copied clipboard sits in the middle of the screen but that it a detail
Did you notice a strange behaviour: if I take a snapshot with snagit, and send to clipboard, I see the annotated image in Copied.
If I take a snapshot with BTT (which I prefer because image editing is very quick) and copy to clipboard (gear sign ➜ copy), WITH LAUNCHBAR INACTIVE the corresponding Copied clip is empty. If I activate Launchbar, everything works OK.
