In a previous post I discussed MacVim Services on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and earlier. With Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Apple has polished Services to make them more easily accessible, but unfortunately this broke some of the MacVim Services at the same time. As of Snapshot 52 (released today!) MacVim Services work on Snow Leopard and in this post I’ll quickly demonstrate how they can be put to good use.
MacVim now exposes two Services: “New MacVim Buffer With Selection” and “New MacVim Buffer Here”. Both can be accessed in the usual (pre-10.6) manner via the Services submenu of the current applications menu, or via a context menu that pops up when you control-click (or right-click) something. The context menu is new in Snow Leopard and makes it so much easier to access Services.
The first Service (New MacVim Buffer With Selection) is available when you control-click the selection in any application (e.g. Safari). When used it will copy the selection, open a new MacVim buffer, and paste the selection into the buffer so you can start editing it.
The second Service (New MacVim Buffer Here) is available when you control-click a file or folder inside a Finder window. When used it will open a new MacVim buffer and set the current directory to that of the file or folder you had selected. This can be handy if you’ve browsed to some folder in the Finder and want to create a new text file inside that folder: simply control-click on any file in the folder, select the Service, add some text, then type :w filename to save the buffer in a file called filename in the folder you had open in the Finder.
Finally, if you don’t want these menu entries clogging up your context menus there is an easy way to disable them: open up System Services, click on Keyboard and select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. In the left-hand list click on Services to bring up a list of avaiable Services in the right-hand view. Search for the Services you don’t want and untick them one at a time and they won’t bother you again.
