I was using Safari to find an article I’d written here on Uncorrected and copied the title text. Invoking Launchbar and hitting the spacebar, I recently discovered, allows you to send text input to OmniFocus’s inbox. It’s not really faster than using OmniFocus’s input panel, but I use Launchbar so much that I often find myself ctrl-spacing and typing o-f before I can stop myself. So why not?

True to form, I invoked OmniFocus and paused long enough to remember to hit the space bar. I pasted in the name of the article and added it to the inbox. A delightful side effect of adding a next action to OmniFocus this way is that it copies the URL of the webpage to clipboard as well, and drops that into the notes field of the action. Had I used OmniFocus’s quick input panel, I would have had to have separately copied the URL from Safari in a second step.

Other apps that can take text input this way include Drafts, Spotlight, Fantastical (which feature I apparently used back in April of 2024 and subsequently forgot). If the app doesn’t take text input, it shows a list of most recently opened documents.

Launchbar never ceases to amaze.

Update 6/11/2025: Copying a URL and following the same procedure yields the same result, but the feature is smart enough to grab the page title and make it a link, which is inserted into the notes field, with the next action name left blank. Smart.

It turns out that Launchbar is grabbing the OmniFocus System Service. I assigned that service a shortcut in the Keyboard menu of System Settings, so I can invoke it that way, too; it is, of course, exposed in the UI under the Services submenu of the currently active application menu.

I’ll probably still just use Launchbar.