During the course of my workday, I paste dozens of web links into emails, Slack messages, iMessages, and my personal notes. I hate having to ⌘+Tab to Safari, hunt for the tab I need, navigate to the address bar, highlight & copy the tab’s URL, and then ⌘+Tab back to the app I was using and paste the link. This sort of context switching often interrupts my writing flow and train of thought.
To make this workflow a little bit easier, I devised a simple, but effective, TextExpander script snippet to grab the URL of the active tab in the front-most Safari window. Here it is:
tell application "Safari" to get URL of front document
This is useful most of the time, however there are instances when I’d like to get a list of all my open Safari tabs and pick the one I’d like to paste. With a little bit of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro magic, this is pretty easy to accomplish.
Here’s the AppleScript I authored to be run by a Keyboard Maestro macro that’s triggered by typing some text (in my case “.turl”):
-- Get a list of tabs in Safari
tell application "Safari"
set _tabNames to {}
set _tabURLs to {}
set _frontTabName to name of front document
-- Create a list of URLs separated by window
set _windows to every window whose visible is true
repeat with _window in _windows
set end of _tabNames to "----------"
set end of _tabURLs to ""
repeat with _tab in _window's tabs
set end of _tabNames to name of _tab
set end of _tabURLs to URL of _tab
end repeat
end repeat
set end of _tabNames to "----------"
set end of _tabURLs to ""
end tell
-- Pick from the list of open tabs and output the choset tab's URL
set _currApp to (path to frontmost application as Unicode text)
tell application _currApp
activate
choose from list _tabNames with title "Safari Tabs" default items _frontTabName
if result is not false then
set _tabChoice to item 1 of result
else
return
end if
repeat with _i from 1 to the count of _tabNames
if item _i of _tabNames is _tabChoice then return item _i of _tabURLs
end repeat
end tell
For reference, here’s a screenshot of the macro I built in Keyboard Maestro:
Note: The script action needs to be set to “Type Results” upon successful execution.
Hopefully these two shortcuts designed to grab a link from Safari will help you as they have helped me stay in the flow and save a little bit of time in the process.
