Can I somehow make a shortcut for Make Uppercase?

Ever since I first noticed Transformations in the contextual menu when I have text selected, I’ve been using Capitalise and Make Uppercase an awful lot.

Now I’m in the midst of a job that requires a whole bunch of tidying up - and I’m using Make Uppercase absolutely constantly. Normally, I’d just make an app-specific shortcut in System Preferences, but because the Transformations items are not menu items, but only seem to exist in the contextual menu, I’m stuck.

Does anyone have any ninja moves I can pull on this to keep my keyboard-focussed workflow fast?

Everything crossed…

Does pressing CTRL-shift bring the contextual menu?

I don’t know what app you’re using, but many Mac apps place Transformations under the Edit menu, so you should be able to create a keyboard shortcut.

PopClip might be an alternative if you’re selecting this text using the mouse pointer. It has an Uppercase option.

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Download WordService from Devontechnologies: it’s on the App Store (‎WordService on the Mac App Store) and it’s free.

It adds a lot of text manipulation commands to the Services Menu: far too many to list here, but they include all the ‘change case’ commands you’d need and of course you can add shortcuts for the ones that are most relevant to you.

You’ll need to enable the ones you want (you won’t want them all…) in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts, of course, but after that they’ll be available in every suitable app.

Here I’ve enabled

  • ALL CAPS
  • Initial capitals of sentences
  • Initial Capitals of Words
  • lowercase

They also do a similar service, CalcService for calculations.

HTH.

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I use popclip for these sorts of things, it’s perfect

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Alternatively if you use Alfred I made a workflow for this, & you can create a system-wide or app-specific hotkey.

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Thanks for all the input folks.

  • PopClip looks superb, but sadly, doesn’t work in my context (renaming in the Finder).
    It also seems to introduce some strange conflicts with Finder in Catalina (arrow keys and return key don’t work as expected). This may be a non-issue, but as PopClip wasn’t solving my problem, I didn’t follow it up.

  • WordService doesn’t seem to be available from renaming in the Finder, so that’s also a non-starter

  • dfay’s Alfred script worked right away though!! Superb. Many many thanks.

Now can I have all the hours back where I was using the mouse for this one step that’s now a hotkey? :slight_smile:

Thanks again everyone

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Ah, you didn’t mention it was for the Finder — you’re right, of course, WordService won’t work for that as it’s for text elements only.

Alfred seems like a good solution, but if you don’t want to use a third party app just for this, you can roll you own version in Automator easily enough by creating a Quick Action:

This Quick Action renames all selected Finder files to upper case. You don’t need to click on individual items to open their ‘rename’ status’, just select them in the normal way, then press the short cut you’ve chosen.

NB: At the moment, the version above makes a copy in the Desktop folder and renames that, leaving the original intact, so that you can test it properly to make sure you’re happy with how it behaves. Once you’re happy, then just replace the ‘Copy’ stage with 'Get Selected Finder Items as below (this one is a Rename to lowercase version…)

Once you’ve saved the Quick Actions, they’ll appear in System Preferences > Extensions. Make sure they’re enabled, then go to System Preferences > and give them suitable shortcuts, which will become available in the Finder when you select files.

As always, if you do want to try this approach, test it thoroughly on dummy files first!

As I said, not necessary if you’re happy to use Alfred (or KM) but it gives an alternative to explore if you want :grinning:.

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