Instapaper Keyboard Shortcut

Like many people these days, I am using Marco Arment’s Instapaper to facilitate effortless postponement of reading longer, potentially interesting content I find on the web.

Marco provides a handy bookmarklet that you can add to your browser’s button bar, so when you find something cool you just click “Read Later” and it gets added to your Instapaper collection. This is handy, and if you’re using a browser like Safari, these bookmark bar items even get mapped to default keyboard shortcuts based on their position, e.g. Cmd-1, Cmd-2, etc.

My news reader of choice, NetNewsWire, also supports Instapaper, allowing me to easily add any news item’s underlying content to my “Read Later” list. In NetNewsWire, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-P (for paper!), and I’ve gotten hard wired to punting stuff to my reading list with a quick flick of the keys.

For months I’ve thought it would be nice if I had the same workflow in Safari and in NetNewsWire: see something, want to read it, don’t have time, press Ctrl-P. I don’t know why I took so long to sit down and spend the 5 minutes it took to write an AppleScript wrapper for Marco’s bookmarklet, and install it in my scripts folder to invoke with FastScripts.

If you want to be cool like me:

Download and install FastScripts. Free for up to 10 shortcuts!

From the FastScripts menu-bar icon, select FastScripts -> Create Safari Scripts Folder.

Download this script, and move it to the Safari-specific scripts folder: [Home] -> Library -> Scripts -> Applications -> Safari

Switch to Safari.

While holding the Cmd key, select “Read Later” from the FastScripts menu.

Assign a keyboard shortcut of your choice. (Ctrl-P for NNW-likeness).

Now whenever you see a cool page in Safari, just press Ctrl-P to instantly tag it for later reading.

Update: David Kendal observes on Twitter that you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to bookmarks in Safari by simply using the System Preferences Keyboard Shortcuts and assigning to the correctly named bookmark. I was not aware that this would work with bookmarks! Very cool. It diminishes the necessity of the above workflow considerably, though I was pleased to be able to take “Read Later” out of my bookmarks bar. Another downside to the System Preferences route? Apparently the keyboard shortcuts will never take effect until you’ve shown the menu that they appear in at least once per Safari-launch.