Do Things with Text with Liquid for OS X

Brian Croxall writes regularly about the ways that keyboard shortcuts can improve one’s productivity on a desktop or laptop: He’s urged people to “Learn Your Keyboard Shortcuts,” demoed “Using Keyboard Shortcuts in Google Tools,”, and even shown off “Creating Keyboard Shortcuts for ANYTHING.”

And it’s true–keyboard shortcuts are powerful timesavers. It’s one of the reasons why application launchers (a misnomer, since the apps can usually performa variety of tasks) such as Alfred, Quicksilver, LaunchBar, and others have been popular over the years. (There are, I gather, Windows-based launchers, too. The KDE implementation of Linux has long since offered such functionality directly, via alt-F2.)

Mac users who work with text a lot might want to take a look at Liquid, an app that lets you do a number of handy things without ever lifting your fingers from the keys. You can perform conversions, translate text, look up text (across an endlessly-configurable array of search engines), share via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook, or copy text as a citation (i.e., with date accessed, and other data). Liquid is an app-based version of the old Firefox add-on Hyperwords, except it is of course more useful since it works anywhere there’s text.

The developer, Frode Hegland, has made a screencast demonstrating its features:

Liquid 2 OS X from Frode Hegland on Vimeo.

To be clear, then: Liquid turns command-@ into a system-wide shortcut that can be invoked anytime you have selected (not copied–just selected) text in an app.

I turned on Flickr searching with Liquid as a quick way to find images for blog posts. One tool that researchers might be interested in is Liquid’s “Sentences With” copy feature: In any document, highlight a word or phrase, then hit 2 (for copy), then s (for Sentences with): Liquid will copy every sentence in that document that contains the word or phrase.

Liquid comes in a free version, which does not support translation and doesn’t let you customize the search engines. But the paid version is only $4.99, so it’s definitely worth a try.

Photo “Verdi-Grass” by Flickr user Neal / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0