Note: Thanks to tjluoma for reviving the guts of the wonderful QuickCursor workflow. I have edited the description slightly (and the script of course) for use with Sublime Text. Besides installing the Keyboard Maestro macro as below, you must also update the path to your Sublime Text command line binary subl.

Current Issues: Unfortunately I intermittently am experiencing this only working once, then on subsequent calls I have to manually paste back in the results as tj warns. I've found quitting ST3 resolves this again. Big welcome to anyone who can solve this issue?

Forked Changes:

• replaced the BBEdit command line tool call with Sublime Text's.
• re-ordered the command line arguments to not open multiple tabs/windows.
• added an optional argument to open in distraction-free-mode. My preference, omit this line or adjust to your liking.¹

A quick-and-dirty attempt at implementing QuickCursor using Sublime Text and Keyboard Maestro.

For those who aren't familiar with QuickCursor: QuickCursor did one thing really well: anywhere you could edit text, it would send that text to your favorite text editor and then when you closed that file, it would send the text back to the original application.

So, for example, if you were using Google Chrome to write an email in GMail but wanted to write it in BBEdit, you would just press your keyboard shortcut for QuickCursor, it would select all of the text (or just part of it if you had some already selected), cut it, open it in BBEdit, wait for you to finish, and then switch back to Google Chrome and paste the text that you had written in BBEdit.

Got it? Good. (If not, watch the YouTube video for QuickCursor.)

In a word: sandboxing. QuickCursor was killed by sandboxing.

This annoyed me for several reasons. QuickCursor was the first app that I bought from the Mac App Store. But most of all I really missed being able to edit text in BBEdit from anywhere.

Download the Macro by option clicking on the Download link. If your browser prompts to add a .txt extension on the end ensure you refuse this. It should end in .kmmacros

Double-click the downloaded file and it will be automatically installed in Keyboard Maestro for you.

Open the terminal and create the following symbolic link.

For Sublime Text 3:

ln -s /Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl

For Sublime Text 2:

ln -s /Applications/Sublime Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl

Like so:

1. User presses a keyboard shortcut which has been defined in Keyboard Maestro which triggers a macro which I call 'edit anywhere' (or "EA" for short).

2. EA checks to see if the menu item 'cut' is enabled.

   • if yes, then EA assumes that you have some text selected, and that is the text you want to edit in Sublime Text.
   • if no, EA will do 'Select All' (using either the menu item or ⌘ + A depending on which is available)

3. EA will then 'cut' the text from step 2 and save it to a file ~/.edit_anywhere. That file is 'hidden' in your home directory, which means that:

   • you can save it as often as you like
   • if you reboot your computer (or, heaven forbid, it crashes) the file will still be there
   • it is secure, at least in as much as no one else should be able to read it unless they already have access to your account.

4. EA will then open the file in Sublime Text using the command-line subl tool which comes with Sublime Text.

5. When you close the ~/.edit_anywhere file in Sublime Text, it will re-activate the app that the text came from. (Note: this step is not foolproof. If you have quit the app or changed it in some way since editing the text, it might not be possible to send the text back to it. QuickCursor had the same problem.)

6. EA will then paste the contents of that file into the original app.

7. EA will then rename the ~/.edit_anywhere file to something like edit_anywhere.2013-08-29--16.30.15.md (representing the current date and 24h-time) and move it to the trash (~/.Trash/) in case you need to recover it.

• This will only work in 'regular' applications. Specifically if will not work in applications which only exit in the menu bar.

• Theoretically you could re-work this to use Mac OS X's open command using something like open -n -W -a YourApp ~/.edit_anywhere.md. However, if you did that you would have to store the name of the application where the text came from in a Keyboard Maestro variable and then add a command in your Keyboard Maestro macro to re-activate that app before pasting in the text. That isn't difficult to do, in fact the original version of my macro did that, but Sublime Text's command-line subl tool has a --resume flag built right in which is designed to do just that, so I am using it instead of reinventing the functionality.²

• It would also be possible to edit the Keyboard Maestro macro to check to see which app the text is coming from an use a different editor depending on that source application. (For example, if the front-most app is Mailplane, I want to edit text in MultiMarkdown Composer vs if the front-most app is Safari I want to edit text in BBEdit.) I just wanted something to give me the base functionality back. I'm not sure whether or not I'll extend it to add that level of customization, mostly because I almost always want to edit text in BBEdit.