Type some text in TextEdit, select it, and go to the TextEdit → Services menu. Once it’s there, it’ll be accessible in any program that lets you type, like TextEdit or Mail. If you save this as a Quick Action, macOS will put it in a folder named ~/Library/Services. Here’s a super basic example that takes selected text, converts it to uppercase with the tr bash command, copies it to the system-wide clipboard using the pbcopy shell script, gets the contents of the clipboard, and then replaces the selected text: One kind of workflow is called a Service (or Quick Action), which can take text (or a file), do stuff to it, and spit out new text. MacOS comes with Automator, a program that lets you create workflows for repeated tasks. However, through the magic of macOS services, Bash scripting, and AppleScript, I’ve found a way to convert Markdown text to richly formatted text, and it’s delightful! …and Airmail would convert that to nicely formatted HTML. Oh, I see! You have an error in the 3rd line there. I could respond to student questions by typing stuff like: This is the coolest thing ever if you use Markdown everywhere normally, but it’s even better when teaching code-heavy classes. Most importantly for me, though, is that it let you write e-mails in Markdown and then converted the Markdown text to HTML when you clicked send. Airmail is fast, looks nice, and has great search features. This means I’ve had to move away from my favorite e-mail client ever: Airmail. In the macOS world, the only program that supports it is Apple Mail. The issue with this is that very few e-mail clients support Modern Authentication. Instead, any e-mail client I use has to have support for Microsoft’s special Modern Authentication system, which opens up a popup window to handle the 2FA and logging in and everything. However, for whatever reason, GSU’s version of Duo’s 2FA doesn’t allow you to generate app-specific passwords for things like e-mail. Everybody should use some sort of 2FA for all their important accounts! GSU also enforces 2-factor authentication (2FA) with Duo, which is also fine.
My previous institutions-Duke and BYU-both use it too, and it’s pretty standard. GSU uses Microsoft’s Office365 for e-mail, which is fine.