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Keep It AppleScript Tips

Contents

• Terminology
• Getting Objects
• Creating, Moving and Renaming
• Adding Files
• Adding Links
• Adding Text and Attachments
• Exporting

See these tips at any time by choosing Help > AppleScript Tips from the menu in Keep It.

Terminology

While the Keep It app refers to folders, bundles and things like All Items collectively as “lists”, a list is a class in AppleScript, and so Keep It’s scripting terminology uses “groups” instead.

Similarly, “item” is a generic term in AppleScript, and so items in Keep It are referred to as ”Keep It items” in AppleScript.

Open Keep It’s dictionary in Script Editor and look at the Keep It suite to see all its terminology.

Getting Objects

Keep It provides convenient ways to get the currently selected group or items:

Or the current item either selected in the list or opened in its own editing window, if that window is frontmost:

And the standard groups:

Along with some useful things:

And collections of items:

Being flat lists, almost none of those things are guaranteed to have a unique name. For folders, you can safely assume that a child folder of a particular folder has a unique name, and you could fetch that by walking the path. For example, if you have a folder at the top level called “Folder”, and it has a child folder called “Subfolder”:

…but there is no guarantee that a bundle in a folder, or a Keep It item in a folder or bundle will have a unique name. If that is an issue, and your script is only targeting your own library and not other people’s, then get the folder, bundle or Keep It item is by its identifier.

When using identifiers it doesn’t matter where something is located, or what its name is. To get a group’s identifier:

• In Keep It, Ctrl-click or right-click the folder or bundle
• Hold on Option and choose Copy Identifier from the menu shown

You can then use the identifier as follows:

For Keep It items hold on the Option key and choose Item > Copy Item Identifier from the menu, and the you can get the item like this:

Tags always have a unique name in Keep It, and so it is possible to do this:

In most cases, Keep It lets you use tags and tag names interchangeably.

Creating, Moving and Removing

It’s possible to create folders and bundles with the standard “make” command. A location must be specified, along with a name:

And it’s possible to move folders, bundles, saved searches and Keep It items with the standard “move” command:

You can delete a bundle no matter where it’s stored with the standard “delete” command:

…but folders and Keep It items need to be in Deleted Items first:

Keep It items can be in many bundles, so there is a special command for that:

Tags cannot be created with a “make” command. Instead, you create tags by applying them to items. Tags are the only thing in Keep It that can be uniquely identified by name, therefore Keep It allows you to use the name of a tag for convenience in many places:

Adding Files

Keep It is a sandboxed app, which means you can’t pass it file paths as text such as this, because it won’t have permission to access the files:

Instead, you either need to create a POSIX file path, like this:

…or an alias, using a colon-separated path like this:

You can also use folder actions, the “choose file” dialog, drag and drop a file onto an AppleScript app, and so on.

To add files using your default settings:

Or include options to specify how to add the files, where to store them, tags to add, and whether or not to convert text files to notes, or ask whether to keep both files when a conflict is found:

Adding Links

To add a link using your default settings:

Or include options that specify where to store the web link, its name, whether or not save it for offline and in which format, along with any tags to add:

Adding Text and Attachments

To add a note with some text:

Or add options to specify the format, destination for the new file, tags and name:

To append text to a specific item:

And to add an attachment:

Exporting

Keep It can either export an individual Keep It item, or a group. The item or group’s filename will be made unique in the destination. Keep It will prompt to decrypt encrypted items, and notes will be exported as rich text files, either with or without attachments. See “Adding Files” above for important information about how to specify files when working with Keep It.

To export an individual Keep It item to a folder chosen by the user:

The exported file will be returned once the export is complete.

To export a group:

For groups, the exported folder will be returned immediately, but the export operation will continue in the background.

When exporting "All Items" the top level folder will actually be exported, and so the folder hierarchy will be preserved.

See Also

• Keep It Shortcuts Support
• Keep It Automator Support
• Keep It URL Support

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