What's the easiest way to surround text with with eg. quotes?

[Shruggie]

I want to be able to do this in any app, and I also want to be able to do it with parens, brackets, curly braces, those weird backwards quotes etc.

I realize I can do it with Keyboard Maestro, but I’m not using KM right now, and find it a bit heavy-duty for just this use case.

Tools I do have installed, and would prefer using (sorted by how useful I think they would be here :)): Raycast, Espanso… Paste…?
Installing a new light-duty tool would obviously be fine as long as long as it’s not a huge deal…

Yes, yes, it’s a programming thing, but I don’t want to just do it in my IDE (JetBrains), since I often write code on GitHubs web interface and in terminals and stuff.

[Pete]

I use PopClip for this.

[Shruggie]

Oooh, fun!
And part of SetApp which I already use

[grs]

I second PopClip. It’s a really useful app.

[lsamberg]

I used popclip for this purpose for a long time. Swirtched over to Alfred a couple of years ago.

Nothing wrong with popclip but I use Alfred for other things and try to consolidate apps when I can.

[MevetS]

Are you looking to enclose already written text? Or are you looking to have the closing character of the pair automatically added when the opening character is typed?

For the former I to recommend PopClip. For the latter I would expect you could define rules in Espanso (I use Typinator for this case).

[Shruggie]

No, after. I often write a long paragraph and then do the formatting afterwards.

[Synchronicity]

I don’t see that function in the Text Workflow app, but I bet the dev would add it if asked.

[ciaran]

How do you do this with Alfred?

[lsamberg]

With a Universal Action WorkFlow. I have about a dozen of them. You can see the formation of one of them below. Then I select the text and hit my Universal Action key (opt-tab for me) and I get a menu of choices.

[Nick]

Popclip is almost the first app I install on a Mac. I almost can’t remember a time when I didn’t use it.