Text Workflow

Text Workflow is a Mac utility for chaining text-transformation operations into reusable visual pipelines, replacing a dozen separate scripts with a single drag-and-drop editor.

What is Text Workflow?

Text Workflow is a text-processing app built around the idea that most writing-adjacent busywork — changing case, sanitising whitespace, encoding special characters, pulling out data like email addresses or URLs — should require zero code. You build a pipeline by stacking individual steps in sequence, paste or type your input, and the transformed result appears instantly.

Developed by Siri Morvik, it sits in that productive middle ground between a plain text editor and a full scripting environment. If you have ever opened a terminal just to run a one-liner that trims whitespace, or kept a messy collection of TextSoap presets, Text Workflow is the thing you did not know you needed.

What does Text Workflow do best?

The pipeline builder is where Text Workflow genuinely shines. Each transformation — capitalise title-case, convert camelCase to snake_case, URL-encode, strip HTML tags, reverse line order, deduplicate lines, extract patterns — is a discrete step you can reorder, toggle on or off, and save as a named preset. That composability is the killer feature.

I keep a handful of persistent pipelines open: one that cleans pasted copy from Google Docs (strips smart quotes, normalises dashes, collapses multiple spaces), another that takes a raw list of emails and deduplicates and sorts them before I drop them into Mailchimp. Neither required me to write a single regular expression by hand.

• Case conversions: title case, sentence case, UPPER, lower, camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, kebab-case
• Whitespace tools: trim leading/trailing, collapse multiple spaces, remove blank lines
• Encoding/decoding: URL encode/decode, HTML entities, Base64
• Extraction: pull emails, URLs, or custom regex matches from a blob of text
• List operations: sort, reverse, deduplicate, number lines

Pipelines run entirely on-device. Nothing leaves your Mac, which matters when you are processing client data or anything remotely sensitive.

Is Text Workflow free?

Text Workflow is free to download from the Mac App Store, with a freemium model that unlocks additional step types and unlimited saved pipelines via an in-app purchase. The free tier is genuinely useful — I ran it for two weeks before hitting a ceiling — so you can evaluate it properly before spending anything.

Who should use Text Workflow?

Text Workflow is the right tool for anyone who touches text repeatedly in structured ways: copywriters cleaning up pasted drafts, developers massaging API responses or renaming variables en masse, data analysts tidying CSV columns before import, and marketers normalising ad copy across formats. If your daily work involves any of those rhythms, it will earn its keep inside a week.

It is not aimed at users who need heavy regex authoring, multi-file batch processing, or scripted automation that runs on a schedule. For that tier of power, a tool like BBEdit's text factories or a Python script is the better match. Text Workflow is for interactive, human-in-the-loop transformation where speed of setup matters more than programmability.

How does Text Workflow compare to its alternatives?

The closest competition comes from a few different directions. TextSoap has been doing Mac text cleaning for decades and is excellent at document-level scrubbing, but its interface feels dated and it lacks the pipeline metaphor. Keyboard Maestro can replicate everything Text Workflow does and far more, but it requires a steeper learning curve and a much larger investment of setup time per task. PopClip handles quick one-step transforms on selected text brilliantly — it is complementary rather than competing.

For pure case conversion, countless menu bar utilities exist (I used Rocket Typist snippets for years). Text Workflow beats them the moment you need more than one operation applied in sequence. That is the differentiator: the chain, not any individual step.

What are Text Workflow's main limitations?

A few honest caveats. The step library, while solid, is not exhaustive — if you need sophisticated regex substitution with capture groups, you will end up copy-pasting into a terminal anyway. There is no command-line interface or Shortcuts integration, so it cannot be wired into automated workflows that run without you present. And the UI, while clean, is strictly Mac-only with no companion iOS app if you sometimes edit on an iPad.