What about a scrollable text view?

[Ptujec]

For the most part LaunchBar offers plenty of options to display information in it's standard list interface. An item can have a title, subtitle, label and badge. But sometimes I dream about some sort of a scrollable text view.

Why?

Here is an example. I have an action that displays the summary of a Wikipedia entry if available.

function run(argument) {
  var extract = HTTP.getJSON(
    'https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/' +
      encodeURIComponent(argument)
  );

  var result = extract.data.extract;

  if (result != undefined) {
    // LaunchBar.performAction('Text vergrößern', result);
    LaunchBar.displayInLargeType({
      title: argument,
      string: result,
    });
  } else {
    LaunchBar.openURL(
      'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/' + encodeURIComponent(argument)
    );
  }
}

It uses large type. It is currently the best option for the task. But it has it downsides. By default this is how it looks:

After splitting up the text it looks better.

But the real downside is that it is kind of a dead end. You can paste the text in the front window with ⇧↩. But there is much more you can do with a normal list item. You can assign an url to open the full article, send the text to another app or action …

Another downside is that LaunchBar gets activated if you use large type (same with Quicklook). So you can not dismiss it with ESC or ↩. You have to use ⌘H. And in the past there where also issues, when using it in a space. (But spaces suck in general.)

So this is how the idea came about. What if there would be something that would be more like a normal list item but would be able to display more text.

How?

I have no clue how realistic this is, but it would be cool if this would be kind of an expanded version of a normal list item. Right now when you hit → on a selected text you will get a list with all the words as list items (or stats if you hold ⌥). Maybe if you hold another modifier key you could get a scrollable text view. It could also be the default behavior for → when text exceeds a certain number of characters.

Ideally you could do all the things with it you can also do with a normal item e.g. hit ⇥ to send the text to another action or application.

Would be nice, wouldn't it?

Other current options

Other current options to display more text are:

• adjust the width of the LaunchBar interface
• or use Quicklook (after saving it to a text file)
• or an alert.

But they all leave me wishing there would be another option.