Copy selected text to the clipboard

Discussion & Help
1

I try the use the following AppleScript in the “New Item” tab to copy a selected text with Hook:

set theSelectedText to ""
set savedClipboard to the clipboard
-- Copy selected text to clipboard:
set thePasteboard to current application's NSPasteboard's generalPasteboard()
set theCount to thePasteboard's changeCount()
-- Copy selected text to clipboard:
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "c" using {command down}
-- Check for changed clipboard:
repeat 20 times
    if thePasteboard's changeCount() is not theCount then exit repeat
    delay 0.1
end repeat

set theSelectedText to the clipboard

-- Restore clipboard:
set the clipboard to savedClipboard

It seems that Hook is the frontmost app so no selected text is there to copy. Any ideas how to solve this?

2

Not at the moment. I think Hook would need to expose the name of the frontmost app at the time it was invoked as a special variable in the scripting framework. I’ve asked internally.

3

I’ve not tried this, but you could hide the Hook window, or change its window index to “count windows”, then copy the text.