Whatever happened to Terminal Services?

marmoset

marmoset

Official Volunteer
Some of you who were around in the Public Beta
days might have used Terminal Services. i.e.
you could highlight a chunk of text in a Cocoa
application and execute a unix command using
the selected text as a parameter. Very handy.
Unfortunately, I just realized that Apple seems
to have removed this functionality from the
version of Terminal.app that ships with
OSX final. Does anyone have any idea why they
did this? More importantly, does anyone know
how to restore the lost functionality? Thanks.
 
Well... the Services menu are still there and after installing OmniWeb i got a new Service (Open url) so it can still be done, but I can't find the place to modify/add new services.
Anyone ??? Please ???
 
I was looking for this the other day, it looks like it's part of Apple's 'Great Unix Coverup'. There was also an 'Execute Unix Command' or something in the finder wasnt there?
 
The ability for Terminal.app to do services still seems to be there. If you look at the package contents of Terminal.app, you can see "Terminal.app/Contents/Resources/DefaultServices.svcs". Similarly, if you look in a language's .lproj folder, there are multiple service references... What I don't understand is that, if I remember correctly, Terminal.app is installed with the Developer Tools CD, meaning that only people who wanted to play around with UNIX would be seeing the service, anyway.

So my question is, can we add Terminal services? I can't imagine that they really took away that ability...

-Bruce Adcock
 
Found this at:
http://www.macsecurity.org/mail/macosx-admin/mar01/msg00932.shtml
----------------------------
There is no way to re-enable the creation of services in terminal.
If you still have an old Terminal.svcs and .services directory you
can use those (No, I don't).

They were removed becuase the UI sucked, the feature set was poor
and it was all very buggy. You could no longer define your own and
the one's Apple defined weren't all there either.

However, I think there is a plan to try to return them in a future
update to OS X/Terminal.app. Though they are not high priority,
they are on the list. Do not expect them for a while.
---------------------------

But the ability to add services are still there. I just installed Xmanview and it added an entry to the services menu. In /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/Resources there is a file named DefaultServices.svcs but from what I can see of the content it is not the one used. There is no other file *.svcs to be found on my system.
 
I found the document /Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/ProgrammingTopics/Services.pdf
That describes to process of adding a service from within a program.
So i guess the applications with working services uses this and the Terminal.app 1.0(v41) does not anymore :-(
Hope they bring it back, it was a very useful feature.

Perhaps some Ÿber geek can hack up something besides Terminal.app that can execute shell commands via Services.

Myself I have to rest for a week to be prepared for the Swedish pagan ritual called "Midsommarafton" when we eat raw herring and drink ourselves into an other dimension :)
 
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