I’ve been using PopClip to highlight text and convert text to all caps/sentence cap/etc. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been noticing problems with copy/paste in MSWord when PopClip is running. The problem disappears when I turn off PopClip. The issue that I have is a known issue and there does not appear to be a fix/patch offered by PopClip
As such, I’m looking for a MacOS utility that will allow me to highlight text and convert the letter into all caps, all lower case, etc.
DEVONthink’s developers have a free app on the App Store, called WordService, which provides a lot of text formatting tools as services (so you add shortcuts to them). It works very well.
Drafts or a text editor like VSCode can do this kind of thing. I have one or two Python scripts I keep around for this kind of thing if you want to go down that route.
Unless you have specific title case requirements—e.g., you need to put something in title case using, say, the APA or MLA rules—and assuming I haven’t misunderstood what you’re trying to do, you can easily put highlighted text into all caps, all lowercase, or capitalize it (every word) by right-clicking on it and selecting “Transformations.” From there your choices are “Make Upper Case,” “Make Lower Case,” and “Capitalize.” I’ve made my own keyboard shortcuts each of these so I don’t have to bother with the menu.
There’s one drawback: this only works in native apps. And even then, it doesn’t work in all (allegedly) native apps. (Looking at you, Excel and Word.) However, I’m test-driving Text Case at the moment, and you can add its pre-defined formats to the services menus when using Word, at least; I still haven’t found a solution for Excel. (Nor, alas, Obsidian.)
Alfred!!! That would be the ultimate solution as I rely on Alfred heavily in my workflow. I have looked at Workflows in the Alfred (4.6) Preferences and can’t find/figure out what I need to do. In my Workflows area, I have the 1workflows I’ve used downloaded/created. I can’t find the Transform Utility anywhere (I think that’s what I need to be looking for). When I go to the “+” button, there’s nothing that I see related to Utilities/Transform. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.
As a recent convert to Alfred, I have taken advantage of everything it offers except workflows. I still like the way that Keyboard Maestro lets me create macros and may never get around to “grokking” how to use Alfred workflows.
As you have some familiarity with Keyboard Maestro, here’s a link on my Dropbox to my text macros, if you’re interested. Your needs are probably different but these might be a starting point for you. (Haven’t done this before so let’s hope the link works for you!)
Look at Alfred > Preferences > General Features > Universal Actions. If you go to the Actions tab you’ll see what’s available. Just set up the shortcut in the General tab, select some text and press the shortcut keys and you’ll see the selected, relevant Universal Actions.
Thanks for that. Unfortunately, it looks like my list of Default Actions under the Actions tab doesn’t include any options to reformat (all caps, lower case, etc.) text. I have “Workflow Universal Actions” checked under the “Other Actions:” section.
Pastebot is a clipboard manager I use that includes custom filters for text transformations (and you can add your own if you need more). Accessible anywhere with a keyboard shortcut.