TextSoap – Macinations

September 4, 2022

⌘ Powerful Uses for TextSoap

TextSoap is a tool that once you begin working with it, you find more ways to use it. That may seem a little odd, TextSoap is just a text editor isn’t it? No, TextSoap is far more than a text editor. It’s an automated way to clean, fix, format, search and replace, and parse text. Yes, it is a very capable text editor that supports large plain text and RTF documents, but it’s main goal is to reformat blocks of text using “Cleaners.” By default there are dozens of cleaners built-in, such as: Remove duplicates <– This is awesome. Multiple Returns to 1 Return – <– Also awesome. Remove Extra Spaces Convert to Upper, Lower, Title Case Add suffix or prefix to each line Sort lines These are all very handy and efficient, but the real power of TextSoap lies in it’s Search and Replace, and Custom Cleaners functionality. The Search/Replace is RegEx aware so you can remove Tabs and […]

April 13, 2021

Text Filtering and Replace with Keyboard Maestro

Along with many other features, Keyboard Maestro has some solid text Filtering features. You can combine this with Search and Replace to strip formatting and clean text. If it’s extensive, I hand this task over to TextSoap, but Keyboard Maestro has quite a few tricks to work with. For example, the Filter block has some built in ways to clean text. As an example, there is: The Search and Replace block can replace words as well as use Regular Expressions. This can be used to remove Tab, CRLF, and other characters that Filter may miss. I used this for a variety of tasks. The obvious is stripping out characters or making sure everything is lowercase. I’ve also taken Katalon Studio comments and stripped out the // and /* blocks so I could use my comments in documentation. Another use has been a macro to convert JIRA tickets into a task list. I copy the text, then use Keyboard Maestro to […]

January 22, 2021

Improve Your Writing With TextSoap

Along with PaperEdit, I'm using TextSoap, as a proofreading tool. Not the editor itself, but it's ability to combine RegEx with text highlighting and capitalization to call out words and phrases for improvement. My original "cleaner" had a list of common words I wanted to avoid, such as "just" and "that." I've made several enhancements to look for past tense words, prepositions and others. These are in separate "cleaners" I can call on as needed. Or I can chain them together in a single pass. For example, I've added \b(been|has been|being|to be|was)\b to call out specific past tense words. There is also a check for words ending in "ed," which is usually past tense. Of course, Ted isn't past tense, so it's not foolproof. \b(was \w+ed\b) Same goes for adverbs and "ly." Again, Lily isn't an adverb, so you have to take the good with the bad. \b(\w+ly\b) I've also created a list of prepositions, just to see how often […]

December 24, 2020

How I Use TextSoap

TextSoap is a tool I bought on a BundleHunt sale thinking it might come in handy one day. That has been an understatement. It’s now a text editor I use almost every day to clean up and reformat text. On it’s own, TextSoap is a great TXT and RFT editor, with all the standard features you would expect. Of course, the power comes from the built in cleaners, RegEx powered Search and Replace feature, as well as chaining together dozens of cleaners to transform text. And those cleaners can be used within other applications, not just within TextSoap itself. So, when working in Valentina Studio, the text can be reformatted without leaving the app. TextSoap can be called from it’s own menu bar applet, from a floating panel, or from other tools like Popclip. TextSoap comes with a dozen cleaners and formatters built in. My most common cleaners are: – Add an extra return between lines– Remove extra returns– Remove […]

June 19, 2020

Three months of working remotely

I've crossed over the three month mark of working from home. And despite circumstances, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. By not being stuck in traffic I have so much more time available. I've been able to exercise with more frequency and still have plenty of time in the evening to play games, watch a movie, or work on side projects like Affinity, Inkle, or doing fun research with DevonAgent. Not to mention, I've saved a ton of money by not eating out and not buying gas. No sympathy for the oil companies I'm afraid. I've also been working on getting my organization groove on. I've made dozen of changes and improvements to my notes, folder and database structure within DevonThink. I've even moved a lot of documentation into DevonThink that was lingering in different folders on the drive. Everything in one place, very tidy. I've created several new Alfred and Keyboard Maestro workflows which have been some nice little timesavers. (Clicking […]

⌘ Powerful Uses for TextSoap

Text Filtering and Replace with Keyboard Maestro

Improve Your Writing With TextSoap

How I Use TextSoap

Three months of working remotely

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