Hello! This TextBuddy update includes much-improved support for working with ChatGPT. You'll find the following new commands under the Command → ChatGPT menu.

• Summarize Text
• Improve Writing Quality
• Fix Spelling and Grammar
• Explain Text
• Translate Text into 26 different languages

along with a "Send Text to ChatGPT" command that sends your raw text directly to ChatGPT for processing.

Using ChatGPT with TextBuddy requires your own OpenAI API key. You can add your API key to TextBuddy in the app's Settings.

Also, beginning with this update, TextBuddy now requires macOS Monterey 12.0 or later.

This is a small bug fix update that improves the OpenAI code generation command.

• Fix incorrect input window width on macOS Monterey
• Change to code-davinici-002 model

Happy 2023! This first release of the year for TextBuddy brings an exciting new integration...

You can now generate text and source code with OpenAI directly inside TextBuddy.

I've written a quick FAQ showing how the feature works with example videos.

Thanks very much to Chris Messina for the great feature suggestion.

Hello! This TextBuddy update brings a few new commands and bug fixes.

New: "Keep Only Numbers" will remove everything except numbers. This is slightly different than the existing "Keep Only Digits" command, which only allowed the digits 0-9. This new command will leave in place numeric symbols such as negative signs and decimal separators.

New: "Convert URLs to Markdown Links" will replace bare URLs in your text with Markdown-formatted links (ready for you to add in a title).

New: There is now a Preference (née Setting?) to choose a default language when transcribing audio.

Fixed: "Capitalize Sentences" should work better now. Not perfect, but better.

This update also includes minor improvements to the About window.

That's all for today. As always, I can't thank you enough for your support of TextBuddy and my other software.

Cheers.  
Tyler

Welcome to the final release of TextBuddy for 2021! (I hope.) This update contains two new features and a number of new commands that are described in detail in this blog post (with example videos!). But, in summary...

Clipboard Actions

Clipboard Actions let you run TextBuddy commands on the contents of your clipboard from any other app on your Mac.

If this sounds similar to the existing Process with TextBuddy macOS service the app offers, that’s because it is. The difference between the system service and Clipboard Actions is that this feature is a bit more obvious and easier to use for those of us who aren’t Mac automation super nerds.

Shell Commands

TextBuddy can now pipe and filter your text through arbitrary shell commands. This lets advanced users mix-and-match the app's built-in actions with the power of the command line.

Misc Updates

• There is a new “Transform → Title Case (Gruber Manual of Style)” that runs your text through John Gruber’s smarter title-casing Perl script.
• “Convert to Plain Text” This is almost always a no-op command, however, it can be helpful with Clipboard Actions to strip rich text formatting before pasting.
• The app has previously offered commands to fetch the current (or all) URLs from Safari as either the raw URLs themselves or as properly formatted Markdown links with each web page’s title. In this update, TextBuddy can now do the same for Google Chrome or the Brave web browser.
• The “Command” menu items have been slightly re-grouped and ordered.
• TextBuddy (finally) has a real Preferences window that lays the groundwork for more app customizations coming in 2022.

Finally, a big heartfelt thanks to everyone who has been so supportive of this little app during its first year. I appreciate it more than you know.

See you in 2022!

This release includes bug fixes for macOS Monterey as well as (I think) a lovely new app icon.

With 2021 mostly behind us, TextBuddy's focus in the near future will be delivering deep integration with macOS Shortcuts and additional automation hooks. If you're interested in testing some of these early features, please reach out.

Hello! Some new features for you in this TextBuddy update...

• New: Two new commands to paste before and after each line in your document. (See demo video.)
• New: Expand and abbreviate file paths that contain ~ (tilde) characters. (See demo video.)
• New: Wrap each line of text as an HTML list. (See demo video.)
• New: Display invisible characters such as newlines, tabs, and spaces.
• New: Press ⌘L to jump to a specific line number.
• Improved: "Wrap Lines and Respect Code Comments" works better. (See demo video.)
• Fixed: Not all characters were correctly encoded with the "URL Encode" command.

Thanks to Brett T, Chris M, and many others for all the feedback and suggestions.

Thanks to everyone for spreading the word about TextBuddy. Mac|Life magazine named the app an Editor's Choice in their June issue this week 🎉

In this release...

• New: Press ⌘Y to repeat the previous command. Thanks to Chris M. for suggesting this!
• Fixed: TextBuddy would often crash when performing a command on a selection of text that contains emoji characters.
• Fixed: When the text editing window was pinned above other apps (always on top), other TextBuddy windows such as the command picker, preferences, etc. would get stuck below the main window.

Thanks again to everyone for supporting this little app. It would make my day if you would tell your friends or coworkers about TextBuddy.

Hello. Welcome to another exciting edition of Fix-All-The-Bugs. In today's episode...

• New: The "Quick Command" palette (⌘T) now also contains any custom scripts you've added to TextBuddy. They will be denoted with a little JavaScript icon next to their name so you can quickly identify them vs built-in TextBuddy commands. You can still access your scripts under the "Script" menu or by pressing ⌘R, but this will give you one keystroke to access any type of command.
• Fixed: Better error handling when macOS incorrectly reports that speech recognition is unavailable.
• Fixed: Solved a bug where the Transcription command would fail after launching TextBuddy if you didn't first run the OCR command at least one time. (Ya'll, programming is hard. Sorry.)

Thanks again to everyone for supporting this little app. It would make my day if you would tell your friends or coworkers about TextBuddy.

A few, nice quality-of-life improvements in this release as well as an important bug fix for Catalina users.

Thanks again to everyone for supporting this little app. It would make my day if you would tell your friends or coworkers about TextBuddy.

• New: You can double-click the name of a command in the Quick Command palette to run it instead of requiring you to press ↵. (Also applies to the Run Script palette.)
• New: Added “Select Word” command ^W.
• New: Added “Select Line” command ⇧ ⌘L.
• New: Added “Select Paragraph” command ^⌥P.
• New: Added a new “Font” menu under the “View” menu to make the editor font size bigger and smaller.
• Fixed: On macOS Catalina, the “input windows” that would ask for information before running a command would become disconnected from the editor window.