Finder folders to Markdown links in Bear

I was just trying to get a list of Finder folders as a bullet list in a Bear note. (I'm finally upgrading my own LAS to v2 and am making it super neat as I go.)

I've known for a while that you can do this:

  1. Select some folders in the Finder. Typically I find myself shift-selecting a whole range, e.g. 20 dated subfolders within another folder.
  2. Cmd+C to copy.
  3. Now if you Cmd+V to paste, and you paste into a text field, you'll get the titles of the folders.

What you get depends where you're pasting. If I do that into this Visual Studio Code window, I get a long file path. If I do it in to a TextEdit window in the default rich text view, it tries to paste the contents of the folders!

I have TextEdit set to open a plain text window by default vs. RTF. That's Settings > New Document (tab) > Format > Plain text. And now when I paste there, I get a really simple list of the folder names.

If you paste into Bear (or, I presume, other Markdown-compatible apps), you get a Markdown link that, when clicked, opens the folder in Finder!

That's brilliant. Just what I want for my JDex: now it tells me what's in my filesystem folders, and I can just click to go there.

Note: only with 2+ folders

Robert points out on Mastodon that this only works if you have 2 or more folders selected. If you 'copy' a single folder, that will paste as a massive blue folder icon!

There's a lot more going on when you press 'copy' than you thought...

A video

Here this is as a quick video.