Get currently selected text in active application in Cocoa

Question

I have a status-menu app that can be started using a system wide shortcut. When the app gets active, it would be great if I could somehow get the text that is selected in the currently running application.

So for example I type something in my text-editor, select the text, hit my global shortcut, my app comes up and I would now love to know the selected text from the text-editor.

What I have so far is the following (adopted code from How to get global screen coordinates of currently selected text via Accessibility APIs.)

AXUIElementRef systemWideElement = AXUIElementCreateSystemWide();
AXUIElementRef focussedElement = NULL;
AXError error = AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue(systemWideElement, kAXFocusedUIElementAttribute, (CFTypeRef *)&focussedElement);
if (error != kAXErrorSuccess) {
    NSLog(@"Could not get focussed element");
} else {
    AXValueRef selectedTextValue = NULL;
    AXError getSelectedTextError = AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue(focussedElement, kAXSelectedTextAttribute, (CFTypeRef *)&selectedTextValue);
    if (getSelectedTextError == kAXErrorSuccess) {

        selectedText = (__bridge NSString *)(selectedTextValue);
        NSLog(@"%@", selectedText);
    } else {
        NSLog(@"Could not get selected text");
    }
}
if (focussedElement != NULL) CFRelease(focussedElement);
CFRelease(systemWideElement);

The problem here is that it does not work with apps like Safari and Mail...

Thanks

Answer 1

This is not technically a solution to your exact question because the user would have to trigger this from the Services menu rather than it simply happening when they trigger your menu bar app.

You could use a System Service. You create a service for your app that sends the currently selected text to your menu bar app via a Pasteboard.