Iddo Gino

One underrated side effect of the AI revolution - everyone's finally using Markdown! I find myself often converting files to Markdown for use in AI prompts (ChatGPT and Claude let you upload files, but can’t do that running Ollama locally & on many other chat platforms) so manual markdown conversion is still useful.

My go-to is to use the markitdown utility from microsoft which is great for almost everything (PDFs, Office Docs, even ZIPs). But I wish it was even quicker. What if I could right click on any file in Finder and just copy it as markdown? Someone has to build it. I already had Xcode booting up and I remembered Automator. Surely this should be an automatorable task, right? Heck yeah!

A few short minutes later – I can now copy almost any file on my computer as markdown - just as god intended. Add it to you mac yourself below:

Pre-requisite - install Markitdown:

See here for installation instructions: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown?tab=readme-ov-file#installation

Now to automator:

You can skip the next part and just download the automator quick action I created here: https://www.dropbox.com/t/UjvXmFmte6EZVLwj

If you are curious, want to build it yourself or just don’t trust unsigned Mac automations from random people on the internet (smart!) just do it yourself:

1. Open Automator

2. New > Quick Action

3. On the top configure:

1. Workflow receives current: files or folders

2. Image: whatever you want the icon to be

4. Look for the “Run Shell Script” action and drag it in

5. Configure the shell script:

1. Shell: /bin/bash

2. Pass Input: as arguments

6. Paste the code below (make sure to double check your markitdown install location with which markitdown in the second to last line)

7. Save it - the name you save it as is how it’ll appear in the right click menu

Easy - now you can right click on any file and copy it as markdown!

Code:

#!/bin/bash

osascript -e 'display notification "Converting to Markdown..." with title "MarkItDown"'

for f in "$@"
do
  # Extract filename and directory
  filename=$(basename "$f")
  dirname=$(dirname "$f")
  name="${filename%.*}"
  
  # Set output path
  output="$dirname/$name.md"

  # Run markitdown
  /opt/homebrew/bin/markitdown "$f" | pbcopy
done