Markdown Service Tools

Markdown Service Tools is a collection of OS X Services to make creating Markdown-formatted text that much easier. Services work in any Cocoa based application (which is most of the apps on your Mac). These Services were tested on Lion, but should work fine on Snow Leopard… maybe even Leopard. They’re each prefixed with “md” to keep them together in your Services menu, and you can assign your own keyboard shortcuts (see last section of this document) to make accessing them while typing more convenient.

The following Services are included:

• Auto-link web search
• md — Blockquote Selection
• md — Bold
• md — Bullet List
• md — Cleanup tables
• md — Convert HTML to Markdown
• md — Convert Indents to Quote Level
• md — Fix Ordered List
• md — HTML to Clipboard
• md — Indent Selection
• md — Inline Links to References
• md — Italics
• md — Link List From Clipboard
• md — Link Selection
• md — Links From Chrome Tabs
• md — Links from Safari Tabs
• md — Ordered List
• md — Outdent
• md — Preserve Line Breaks
• md — Self-link Standalone URLs
• md — Unwrap Paragraphs
• md — Wrap Parenthesis
• md — Wrap Square Brackets
• MultiMarkdown to HTML

Note: some Services are only available when text is selected, and some only when no text is selected but a text field is focused.

Descriptions

The suggested key bindings in each description are just what work for me, personally; there’s no consequence for using something completely different. Just be aware that an application’s default keyboard commands will override any in the Services menu, so a command’s shortcut may become unavailable if it’s already in use by the current application.

Auto-link web search

This Service takes the selected text and runs an immediate web search for it. The first returned link is inserted with inline link syntax. It works well for unique words (application names, famous people, unusual words). It will often return dictionary or Wikipedia links for such phrases. You can also add words like “wiki” or “definition” to the selected text to improve the results, and then delete the extra words after linking.

Suggested key bindings: Control-Option-L

Blockquote Selection

This Service simply prepends a “>” to each line in the selection which contains text. Indentation is preserved as-is. To use indentation to define quote levels, see the “Convert Indents to Quote Level” service.

Convert Indents to Quote Level

This service will look for tab indents at the beginning of each line and assume they define the depth of a quote. Tabs at the beginning of each line will be replaced with “>” characters.

Bold/Italics

These simply wrap selected text in Markdown emphasis syntax. * for italics, ** for bold.

Suggested key bindings: Command-Shift-B (bold) and Command-Shift-I (italics)

Bullet/Ordered List

These two commands create and clean up bulleted and ordered lists. They will remove any current list characters at the beginning of each line, compress blank lines in the selection, fix minor indentation mistakes while maintaining the original structure of the list, and properly increment the leading characters of ordered lists. Just select multiple lines and run one of the Services.

Suggested key bindings: Command-Shift-1 (ordered list) and Command-Shift-8 (unordered list)

Fix Ordered List

Fixes numerical order and indentation in MultiMarkdown lists.

Cleanup Tables

Based on the perl script by Fletcher Penney, this Service will take MultiMarkdown-format tables and clean them up to be readable in plain text.

Force Line Breaks

In Markdown, text without blank lines between it is concatenated into one continuos paragraph, removing line breaks. This is prevented by three spaces at the end of each line, and this Service just adds the spaces to the end of each selected line of text.

Suggested key bindings: None, run it from the Services menu

Indent/Outdent Selection

These Services shift the beginning of all selected lines to the left or right by 4 spaces. Useful for selecting a block of code and indenting it, which makes it get pre/code tags automatically, as well as for manipulating sections of lists to create nested portions.

Suggested key bindings: Command-Shift-] (indent) and Command-Shift-[ (outdent)

Link List From Clipboard

Copy text containing links to the clipboard (in any format, even embedded within other text) and this Service will find all of the links and generate a “reference-style” list of the urls, with titles you can then refer to in your document using [link text][title] syntax. It creates short titles based on the domain of the url, and adds incrementing numbers to duplicate titles to differentiate. This Service is only available when no text is selected.

Suggested key bindings: Control-Option-V, or run it from the Services menu

Links From Chrome/Safari Tabs

These Services will collect all of the tabs in the foreground Safari or Chrome window (respectively), and generate a reference list in the same fashion as Link List From Clipboard. These Services are only available when no text is selected.

Suggested key bindings: None, run it from the Services menu

Link Selection

This will surround the selected text with inline link syntax, and if there’s a single url in the clipboard, will link it automatically. Otherwise, it will create a shell ([link text]()) with an empty parenthesis pair for you to paste a url into.

Suggested key bindings: Command-Shift-L

Wrap Parenthesis/Square Brackets

Simply wraps the selected text in square brackets or parenthesis, which comes in handy more often than you’d think.

Suggested key bindings: Control-Shift-[ (square brackets) and Control-Shift-9 (parenthesis)

Inline Links to References

Select an entire Markdown document with inline links (or a mix of inline and reference links) and run this service to have your links replaced with reference style ([link text][title]) and the references placed at the end of the document. Existing references will be preserved, and titles for new references will be automatically generated based on the domain name.

Suggested key bindings: None, run it from the Services menu

Self-link Standalone URLs

This will search your selection for urls that aren’t currently part of an HTML or Markdown link and surround them with angle brackets (<>). This makes the URL itself a hyperlink when converting to HTML or other formats.

Preserve Line Breaks

By default, Markdown removes line breaks between consecutive lines and turns them into a single paragraph. To preserve hard line breaks within paragraphs, this service will add two spaces to the end of each line which is followed immediately by a non-blank line. This creates <br> tags when converted and preserves your line breaks.

Unwrap Paragraphs

If your source text contains hard wrapping (lines are broken at a certain character width), this Service will reassemble them into continuous lines. It ignores indented blocks of text, and assumes single hyphens at the very end of a line are to be removed and the text preceding it prepended to the next word.

MultiMarkdown to HTML

Processes the selected text through Markdown and SmartyPants to generate clean, typographically correct HTML. The selected text is replaced with the final HTML, but if you want both you can select it again, copy it (Command-C) and then Undo (Command-Z) to get the original text back. Markdown and SmartyPants are bundled in this Service, so no external installation is required.

Suggested key bindings: None, run it from the Services menu

HTML to Clipboard

This service does the same thing as “MultiMarkdown to HTML,” but leaves the selection alone and copies the resulting HTML directly to the clipboard.

Suggested key bindings: Command-Shift-Option-C

Installation

Simply drag the Services you want to use into ~/Library/Services (where ~ represents your user’s home folder). You will have to enable the Services manually in the Keyboard Shortcuts preference pane of System Preferences. Locate them in the list and check the box to the left. You may have to restart running applications to get them to show up. They will become available in the Application Menu->Services menu, as well as from the right/Control-click contextual menu, under the Services submenu (Snow Leopard).

For more information, see my article on installing System Services.

Customizing key bindings

To add keyboard shortcuts to your Services, open System Preferences and choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab at the top. Sometimes there’s a delay when loading this tab as OS X indexes all of the available applications and services. Click on the Services item in the left side of the panel, and then locate your new Service on the right. Note that you can use the checkboxes you see there to enable and disable Services without having to remove them from the Services folder.

Double click in the blank, white area to the right of your Service, as shown with the arrow in the image. When the blank area turns into a text field, press the key combination you want to use to activate the Service. Use a combination of modifier keys (Command, Shift, Control, Option) and a letter or number. If the combination is available (not used by another Service or existing system shortcut), the input field will disappear and be replaced by your new shortcut. If it doesn’t do anything, you’ll need to try a different combination of keys.

If you see a yellow “warning” triangle next to your Service, it means that there is another Service or Application Shortcut using that key combination, but it let you add it anyway. This can cause odd results, but mostly just results in neither shortcut doing anything if both associated actions are available at any given time. Sometimes, if one action is only available in one place, and the other in another place, it can be useful to have the same shortcut on related actions. If you’re not sure what’s conflicting, it’s safest just to change your shortcut and avoid the warning.

End note

The original Markdown Service Tools were created in Perl, Bash and Ruby and made into Services using ThisService. I found the Services created by Automator in Snow Leopard to be a bit slow, but have switched to using Automator for newer Services created in Lion and later. All Services sometimes lag on the first run, but are quite fast for me after first use.

For more Markdown goodness, check out nvALT and, if you’re a TextMate user, have a look at the Blogsmith Bundle (docs). There are a lot of timesaving tricks in there!

Download

Changelog

Updated 2/22/12:

New Service: Blockquote

New Service: Convert Indents To Quote Levels

Unwrap Paragraphs improved (ignores code blocks, indented text, better hyphenation handling)

New Service: Self-link Standalone URLs

Updated 2/14/12:

New service: Unwrap Paragraphs (experimental)

Updated 2/11/12:

New services and revisions to existing services.

Updated 9/2/11:

Fixed UTF-8 handling in HTML to Clipboard

Added Inline Links to References Service

Removed the German text that I was using for testing UTF8 and forgot about.

Updated 9/1/11:

Links from Chrome tabs and HTML to Clipboard services added.

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