Welcome to the lab.

In the last Marked newsletter I wrote a bit about Marked’s Streaming Preview, a feature of Marked that flew under the radar for a few years before starting to gain some traction.

It’s a special window (Preview->Streaming Preview) that watches a private clipboard for updates, updating the preview every time the clipboard contents change. All an app needs to do to interface with it is write Markdown content to the named clipboard, which is easily done from any Swift/Objective-C instance. Normally Marked watches files on the disk for changes, but this special window allows apps to update the preview in Marked without ever writing to disk, and with closer-to-live update speeds. Apps like Drafts, Bear, and The Archive have all implemented it with great results. (I even added some special processing for Bear users, so a majority of the Polar syntax translates to your live Marked 2 preview.)

Because the only trick to using the Streaming Preview is to write to a clipboard, it’s possible to do it in your own scripts as well. You just need to write to a pasteboard named “mkStreamingPreview” and Marked will do the rest.

As an example, Bruno Conte created a Keyboard Maestro macro that will take any currently-selected text and update the Marked preview. Marked has a “Preview Clipboard” command, of course, but that requires copying the text, switching to Marked, and hitting ⇧⌘V — and it opens a new window every time. This macro means you can just select text and hit a keyboard shortcut to live-update the preview window from any application.

Here’s the Keyboard Maestro macro: Copy and Stream to Marked. In order to use it, you’ll need Python’s PyObjC module installed, so if needed, open Terminal and run: pip install PyObjC.

The crux of the macro is in the Python script:

def stream_to_marked(data):
	from AppKit import NSPasteboard
	pb = NSPasteboard.pasteboardWithName_("mkStreamingPreview")
	pb.clearContents()
	pb.setString_forType_(data.decode('utf-8'), 'public.utf8-plain-text')

You can incorporate this kind of script in whatever tools you like. The macro also makes use of Marked 2’s url handler for opening the Streaming Preview externally: just call open x-marked://stream/.

See the docs for more implementation details (including settings a base URL for relative paths). If you come up with cool new ways to use this, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’d like to see Marked’s Streaming Preview integrated into your favorite app, just put the developers in touch with me!

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I had previously bemoaned the fact that the proxy icon is now hidden behind a hover delay in Big Sur. In that post, I mentioned that you could remove that delay in Finder using the command defaults write com.apple.Finder NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0. But that only affects Finder, and you have to repeat it with various bundle identifiers for each app making use of the Big Sur toolbar layout.

I have since realized you can set this globally for all apps in one fell swoop:

defaults write -g NSToolbarTitleViewRolloverDelay -float 0

As far as I can tell, that seems to have done the trick. Just thought I’d update with the new info. I’ve updated the older post as well.

I was browsing my gists recently and found one I’d totally forgotten about, which is somewhat ironic given its purpose: scheduling short-term reminders with alarms from the Terminal. I posted it about it back in 2016, but eventually it fell into disuse, as a lot of my just-playing-with-an-idea scripts tend to.

This one was actually pretty cool, though, and I’ve started using it again. You just run something like dontforget to get ready for dinner in 30m in Terminal, and in 30 minutes, you get a reminder in the form of a “ding” and your computer saying “Time to get ready for dinner.” It has LaunchBar integration for large display text.

I don’t know why I ever decided that Bash scripting was the efficient way to write this one. It definitely isn’t. But I stuck with it and updated it a little bit.

You can now use “at 3pm” or “at 10:30am” type strings to set a specific time. The meridian (am or pm) is required. This only works within 24 hours of the current time.

I also added an AppleScript display dialog if you don’t have the LaunchBar integration enabled. Oh, and for some reason I thought it deserved smarter display of the time, so instead of “in 128 minutes,” it says “in 2 hours 8 minutes”.

Contrary to what I wrote in my original post on this, it will actually work fine if you quit the Terminal session you launched it in (assuming you didn’t force it to run in the foreground, but why would you do that, really?).

This little script really isn’t meant to be used for much beyond a quick reminder within a few hours. I use it when I tell my girlfriend I just need to take care of a quick coding problem I thought of in the evening after I’m supposed to be done for the day. “I’ll be back in 20 minutes, I promise.” When I sit down I run dontforget to get back to your beautiful girlfriend in 20m and my Mac will make sure I’m not a liar.

You can find the updated script in the gist. Feel free to leave comments there if you think of additions or fixes it needs! By the way, I’m using Fish as my shell these days, but this works fine as long as it has the bash shebang on the script.

Backstory: my co-host on Overtired, Christina Warren, has a constantly growing collection of repositories she’s starred on GitHub. As a developer advocate for a Big Tech company, she always keeps her finger on the pulse of the new and cool developer stuff, and her stars serve as a curated list of “projects to watch.” It came up on an episode a while ago, and I decided we should have a way to display the latest ones.

The Overtired site uses WordPress, so even though I’m not doing a lot of WordPress development these days, I figured I’d dust off my PHP skills and whip up a plugin for this. It’s pretty barebones, but it does the job, and you can plug in any username to get their latest stars as a widget.

You can see it in action on overtiredpod.com, all the way down in the footer. I actually have never tried it as a sidebar widget, but it’s really simple markup and I’m just assuming it will work.

As with a lot of my little side projects, this one has a finite audience. A convergence of GitHub users who think their stars are worth sharing and happen to be running a WordPress blog. If that describes you, I have just the thing.

Check out the project page for more details. I doubt this will ever see many updates, but it’s tested with WP 5.7 and should be good for the foreseeable future.

(I would add this to the WordPress plugin directory for fun, but you still have to set everything up in Subversion and I don’t even have svn installed these days, let alone remember how to use it. If it were a bigger project, I might consider it, but it’s just not worth it.)