Xcode Pasteboard Accumulator

Way back in the MPW days, I used to rely heavily on an extension for the IDE that put powerful pasteboard manipulation tools in the window header. Essentially these tools let you treat your pasteboard like a stack, so you could easily accumulate multiple copies and then paste them all out at once.

For some dumb reason, I’ve been living without such conveniences for several years now. I know there are many 3rd party products that add an epic amount of functionality to the standard copy and paste of the system, but I’m not really interested in running a separate application for this purpose.

It occurred to me that this would be a perfect use of Xcode’s Menu Scripts. Xcode not only supports the addition of custom scripts to the menu bar, but supports a unique format by which the scripts can advertise keyboard shortcuts, and integrate seamlessly with Xcode’s text editor. For instance, you can use a script to process the selected text in Xcode and spit back out something else in its place.

Append To Pasteboard is a simple python script that takes advantage of the “pbcopy” and “pbpaste” commands to tack whatever you’ve selected in Xcode on to the end of the existing pasteboard. You stick this within your (horribly located) user scripts folder, where you must name the folders and files with numeric prefixes to inform Xcode where they belong. For example, the script lives in my home directory:

/Users/daniel/Library/Application Support/
Apple/Developer Tools/Scripts/
10-User Scripts/1-DCJ/

Unfortunately Xcode doesn’t handle the situation where some scripts come from your home directory, and some come from the /Library installation directory. So I put everything in my home directory. The “10-User Scripts” is how I tell it to name the menu bar item “User Scripts.” The “1-DCJ” folder is the folder with all my custom scripts in it, and since it is “1,” it comes before all of Apple’s standard scripts that I copied in (10-Open, 20-Search, etc). The process of providing scripts to Xcode is ugly but when you finally get it all put together, this is what you end up with:

Now it’s a snap to cruise through a .m and accumulate method declarations, for pasting into a corresponding .h. Note that the script always appends a newline to the existing pasteboard, which could be annoying depending on what you want to use it for. Since I envision myself almost always double-clicking a function or method declaration and appending it to a list, I find this behavior to be most convenient.

Thanks to Jon Wight for helping with Python.

Update: Any productivity gained by using this macro was certainly lost as I tried desperately to debug Xcode’s latest propensity to “beachball” on launch. Finally, I attached with gdb and found a telling backtrace. Hmm? Yep, when I “zipped” the script for upload to the blog, I left a zipped copy in the scripts folder. Next time I launched Xcode, it choked big time on trying to treat that zip file as a script.