Text Items

A text item represents a piece of plain text. It can be displayed in large type or sent to other items such as search templates, email contacts, scripts or applications.

Creating Text Items

To create a text item, do one of the following:

Select some text in an application and send it to LaunchBar via Instant Send.
Drag a text selection from another application onto LaunchBar or onto LaunchBar’s Dock icon.
Copy some text in another application (Command-C), then switch to LaunchBar and choose Select > Select From Clipboard (or press Command-Shift-V).
Browse the contents of a text file: Select a plain text file, an RTF file or an HTML file and press Right Arrow to get the contents of that file split into text items.
Enter some text using the Enter Text action:

Editing Text Items

Once a text item has been selected (or entered), you can alter that text by pressing the space bar. This is quite useful in conjunction with Instant Send, as it allows you to modify the sent text prior to further processing.

Using Text Items

By default, when you press Return to open a text item, the text gets displayed in large type:

However, more often you will press Tab to send the text to a search template, an email contact, an AppleScript or to an application such as Mail or TextEdit.

Text Items and Instant Send

Text items are most powerful in conjunction with Instant Send. They allow you to perform common tasks such as web searches or forwarding textual information via email with only two keystrokes!

Example 1

You are reading a text document or a web page, stumbling into a word that you want to look up in Wikipedia. Just select that word, press and hold Command-Space to send it to LaunchBar via Instant Send, then press and hold W to send the text to the Wikipedia search template.

Example 2

You are reading an interesting article and want to send a few lines from this article to a colleague. Just select the text, press and hold Command-Space to send it to LaunchBar, then type an abbreviation to select your colleague’s contact card and hit Return.