QuickCursor
QuickCursor allows you to edit text from any application in your favorite text editor.
QuickCursor doesn’t work with every application—Mail.app and Chrome being notable exceptions—but it works with enough of them to be very useful indeed. I use it most as a bridge between Notational Velocity and WriteRoom.
Read on for a brief Q&A with QuickCursor developer Jesse Grosjean.
Are you planning to develop QuickCursor further? The commit messages on GitHub suggest you may be; the product page says not…
Yes, no, maybe…
I’d like to, but it’s been pushed back a bit by other projects. I was working on an updated release, but I ran into some technical problems and I’ve sorta left it behind for now. An issue with all of these ‘edit in…’ solutions is that they never work in all places. The current version of QuickCursor uses the Accessibility API. That generally works OK, but it fails in some important cases, such as Mail.app.
I recently had a brainstorm that instead of accessing the text directly with the accessibility API, I could instead use the Accessibility API to just invoke copy/paste in the source app, to get the text in and out.
This seems like the perfect solution, since it should work in many more places, but when I tried I ran into odd timing issues. The text doesn’t show up on the pasteboard in time, or something like that. Anyway, I couldn’t get it working, so I got frustrated and dropped the project for a while.
I may get back to it, but since it’s free and I’ve got lots of work to do on my for pay projects, it’s been sitting on the back burner.
Have any developers expressed an interest in taking on the project since you open sourced the code?
There has been some interest in submitting bug fixes, but no one has offered to take the project over. I’m not sure that I’m looking for someone to take it over, but I’d love for help on fixing the above issue.
And, just out of curiosity: what inspired you to write QuickCursor in the first place?
Originally I had an ‘Edit in WriteRoom’ input manager plugin that I wrote (much inspired by ‘Edit in TextMate’) for my WriteRoom text editor.
That solution was hacky, and broke on 10.5 due to input manager restrictions, so QuickCursor is intended to be a more generic replacement.
