⇥ Attach text in Snow Leopard

The new Services menu in Snow Leopard finally allows me to fix an old gripe.

The Services menu of OSX is one of my favourite gripes. In principle, it’s a neat and useful thing to have: small utilities that provide contextual services for anything from summarizing text to attaching files to an e-mail.

Unfortunately, until Snow Leopard came out, the Services menu was an unqualified mess—a billion services (most of which were never relevant to what you actually wanted to do) jumbled up in a single menu with no rhyme or reason, and no way to control what actually shows up on the menu.

Now that the White Leper is out, however, the Fruit Company has finally put some work into fixing the mess up, and the Services Menu has become newly useful… except that it’s still missing something that I’ve wanted in there forever: the ability to select some text and have a service save the text to a temporary file and attach the file to a newly created e-mail message. That comes in handy for me when I write short articles for php|a—normally, I don’t really need to save them (we use plain text files and, once I send them, they end up in my mailbox anyway), so being able to go from text editor to e-mail without all the intermediate steps would be very useful to me.

Sure, there is a “New Email with Selection” service, but all that does is copy the text into the body of the e-mail—and that’s not what I need. I imagine that I am not alone in this need, and I have been itching to write a new app for OSX, so I spent a few hours to create Attacher.

Attacher is dead simple to use: once installed, it creates a new entry called Attach Text to E-mail in your Services menu. All you need to do is go into an application that supports services (almost all of them do), select some text and pick that menu item. Attacher will ask you for a filename (it defaults to attachment.txt, but you may want to change the name as it is displayed in your e-mail) and then pops open Mail.app, creates a new message and attaches the text you have currently selected into the e-mail as a file. Note that I say the text you have selected, not copied. What’s in your clipboard is irrelevant—you need to have some text selected in the host application.

Attacher is free (and distributed as-is); it only works on Snow Leopard (the Services infrastructure has changed enough, and all our machines are at 10.6, so I am not really planning to backport it).

• You can download a copy of Attacher here: Attacher.dmg (316kiB)
• You can see how it works (and how to install it, in case you’re having trouble) in this video (QuickTime, 12.94MiB)