Command Line STDIN for Drafts

Drafts for Mac
1

I don’t think I’ve asked this before - and a search doesn’t reveal the answer:

Is it feasible to pipe into a new Drafts draft from the command line?

Something like

ls - l | drafts

I suppose, likewise, one might might want to emit from Drafts.

More sophisticated might be to append to the latest draft.

I know I can create some kind of automation to do this via the clipboard. (Which might make some variant of the technique available on iOS or iPad OS, too.)

2

Sort of…not super elegant, but you can capture STDIN to a temp file and route it contents through an AppleScript. I have the follow shell script saved as “drafts” to do it:

#!/bin/bash

STANDIN=$(mktemp /tmp/seereport.XXXXXXXXXXXX) || exit 1
cat > $STANDIN

/usr/bin/osascript > /dev/null <<ASCPT
    set stdinText to do shell script "cat $STANDIN"
    tell application "Drafts"
        make new draft with properties {content:stdinText}
    end tell
ASCPT

trap 'rm -f $STANDIN' EXIT

Then I can call the below to create a draft with the STDIN output:

ls -l | ./drafts
2 Likes
3

In case it is of use, here’s some scripts I shared a while back.

1 Like
4

Thank you @agiletortoise and @sylumer!

I thought the only way was to use a temporary file. (With my performance hat on I’m a little leery of temporary files but my use case is unlikely to involve a temporary file of more than a very few megabytes.)

It occurs to me that I could write eg Python with command line parameters to control this (or add value).

For example, adding tags or running an action.

(Rewriting - given your sample code - is only if I feel my coding is best done in another language.)

My assumption was that for Drafts to be built cross-platform it might be tough to support command line on Mac and other interface paradigms on iOS - but of course I don’t know the code.