Text Buddy Mac App

Text Buddy

This is another utility application I recently found which does wild and wonderful things with text. It is for manipulating text with 128 mostly useful commands and not for writing code or markdown. You can either open the application and paste the text into it and press command T to bring up the list of possibilities. Or in whichever application you are editing your text activate text body from the services menu. This takes you straight into the list of commands. There are a lot of commands unfortunately you have the possibility to search for what you want to do. There are simple things like removing blank lines or transforming to title case. There are web programming things like stripping HTML code or converting markdown to HTML.

There have been a number of times when I’ve been given some text which needed to be cleaned up one way or another. Perhaps there were odd characters or numbers and spaces at the beginning of each line. There’s a command in Text Buddy which will remove these unwanted characters from every single line. Some people are know to put two spaces in after a full stop, or you have got text with multiple space characters within. Use Text Buddy to remove the consecutive white spaces. Or perhaps there have been weird line breaks in text you’ve copied from some place or other and these can be removed just as easily. Just as easily you could add line numbers to your block of text or have all sentences start with a capital letter. You never know when you might want to add line numbers using Roman numerals. Another command let you keep lines with something specific contained within. Many of the features included you won’t know you need until you get that strange block of text in desperate need of a clean up.

Encryption Service in Text Buddy

I do like encryption and Text Buddy provides encryption facilities. Choose Encrypt with Password and the text is encrypted with AES encryption. This is for your own purposes on your computer and not for sending an encrypted message to someone else. I suspect it might decrypt a message sent by another Text Buddy user if you have the password for it. 

After the encryption command

There are thing you can do with numbers, like adding all the numbers together. Format numbers as currency or spell the numbers as text. Other numbers possibilities only a mathematician could love are available. 

OCR and Transcription in Text Buddy

According to the documentation Text Buddy can transcribe from audio and video files. I have not got that to work yet. It says you have to go to the System Preferences and turn on Voice control in accessibility. I might have to reboot to get it to work. I’ll try later.
The OCR works well. Drag a file in and it finds the text in an image. I dropped in an image of a recipe and it did the job almost perfectly. Just a couple of the numbers were converted incorrectly. Not bad considering it was white text on a black background. There’s a slider which affects how the text is presented. Push it to the left and all the text starts left justified on the page. I did another command to finish off to remove blank lines. I do have another application for OCR called Owl OCR which did a better and quicker job with the same image.

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Text Buddy Interface

The application has a simple interface and can show the line numbers on the left hand side. There is a slide over panel on the right which gives you information about the text in the working area. Then you have a couple of icons at the top to give you extra functionality. The first one allows you to manually move lines towards the beginning or towards the end of the document. This is handier than doing the copy and pasting. I also have this sort of functionality in Drafts, but not just for line but also for paragraphs of text. The next icon is to detect any links within the text and make them clickable. If you make any mistakes when converting your text or transforming it apart from using command said to go back one step at a time there is a history button. This gives you a list of the commands you have used recently along with a button to restore back to that point in time. The next button is useful if you’re working full screen and you need to keep the Text Buddy application on top.

When you’re working in the Text Buddy application at the bottom of the panel giving you information about the block of text there are your options of what to do with the text. You can copy it to the clipboard, replace the text selected or all of it if you haven’t anything selected. The other two possibilities are to either prepend or append to the text which at times can be useful.

Text Buddy in the Services Context Menu

If you use the Text Buddy application from the services menu – Process with Text Buddy – you get a pop-up window of the list of commands to choose from. Choose whichever one you want and the processed text is put onto the clipboard. You can then either pasted over the top of your selection in whichever application you’re using all paste it wherever you want it to be.

Good and Geeky Verdict on Text Buddy

It’s an amazing application which does wild and wonderful useful things with your text. It’s worth getting if you often have to process text to make it look and work right. There have been many occasions when I’ve got a lump of text which had things in it which needed to be removed either on a character, line or paragraph basis. I have a similar application which does things to text on iOS. The list of commands available are extensive and with plenty of variety. I’m impressed with the application and all it can do.