Nikhil Bolar

Nikhil Bolar

I break things most of the time and ocasionally build something nice.

Link Me

less than 1 minute read

Link Me is a simple macOS app that lives in your status bar that makes links copied to your clipboard become clickable when you paste it anywhere.

You can check out the project on GitHub.

The world of NSPasteboard is a very scary one albeit fascinating. So Link Me takes the most recent link on the pasteboard and acquires the public.utf8-plain-text version of the link. The main reason is because no matter where you copy the link from the above item is always present in the meta data.

Since Apple requires secure communications, Link Me forces an https prefix onto the URL. Once that is done it sets the plain text version of the link as a public.html version. It previously cleared all the contents of the pasteboard and now places the formatted link back into it.

But Chrome breaks this, at uses the public.utf8-plain-text version. So as a work around this version is put into the pasteboard as well.