Provide macOS service to translate selection system wide

[jelmervdl]

To provide better integration with macOS², it would be useful if the app could provide a menu item to the system wide "Services" menu*. Something like "Translate with translateLocally…" when text is selected.

Related docs:

• https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/information_property_list/nsservices/#details
• https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/SysServices/Articles/providing.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000853-BABDICBI
• https://hoishing.medium.com/providing-services-on-macos-bb82f5e8ca7a

¹ Incidentally, since Qt uses its own context menu for textfields, it won't work in any Qt app on macOS. It only seems to work in anything based on AppKit. So even macOS's own "News" only provides it in places where AppKit widgets are used… ² I hope other systems might provide similar functionality? Maybe through an MS Word plugin?

[kpu]

I feel like an MS Word plugin is one of those lines academics draw on how far we're willing to go with free integration and straying from research. Charging money or an undergrad project.

[XapaJIaMnu]

This seems like "Very nice to have but a lot of work." I second undergrad projects

[jelmervdl]

Hahaha. Okay. I have a feeling the implementation for a macOS service is pretty close to the thing you need to do to support drag & drop on the application icon in the Dock anyway, so maybe that's something that's within reach at some point.

Plugins for Word, and figuring out the mess that's the Linux Desktop Ecosystem, sounds indeed a bit farfetched.

[jerinphilip]

figuring out the mess that's the Linux Desktop Ecosystem, sounds indeed a bit farfetched

I have plans of some daemon/service/bus and hook ibus or something for outbound translation. I think it'll be glorious if it works.

[jelmervdl]

Update: I have a working prototype of this for macOS: https://github.com/jelmervdl/translateLocally/tree/macos-services

[XapaJIaMnu]

My only pain is that the MacOS version will have more features than the linux version xD

[jerinphilip]

My only pain is that the MacOS version will have more features than the linux version xD

How would we do this? dbus is a good idea?

[jelmervdl]

My only pain is that the MacOS version will have more features than the linux version xD

In this particular case, it's because MacOS is the only operating system that supports this kind of interaction between apps by design.

Nautilus and Dolphin seem to have a similar Service menu, but that's only for files I suppose. The only other solution I can think of is a global hotkey, but I don't know how that would get the selected text.

[XapaJIaMnu]

No idea, honestly, someone more experienced with windows GUI could do this.

I imagine it'd have to be a per toolkit solution with GTK apps using one codepath and QT apps using another, and whatever other toolkits there are using whatever other codepath...