Posted on 11/9/09.
Is there a way to create from the list of applications in my Applications folder a text file from which I can start a Bento database?
– John Russell
Mention this post on Twitter!
Submit this post to Digg.
Check out the free MacMost weekly email newsletter.
Become a fan of MacMost on Facebook.
Yes. Check this out. Go in the Finder to your applications folder. Select all the applications. Copy (Edit, Copy or Command+C). Now open TextEdit or any text editor. Paste (Edit, Paste). You get a list of all applications! You may have “.app” after each one, but you can always do a search and replace to get ride of those.
Thanks for the idea, but it didn’t work for me. Command-A selected all application names, Command-C apparently copied to the clipboard. Then, with TextEdit open, I clicked in the empty document, entered a Command-V, and the beachball appeared. After a minute or so I tried a Force Quit. The screen did funny things and eventually I ended up with a whole bunch of the apps’ **icons** pasted in the text document (I started in list view). I have other problems with my Mac and this is the reason I wanted the list of apps – - so that I’d have a list to work from and be able to reinstall them one at a time. I’m going to put a related question in separate post…
Try making sure that TextEdit is set to Plain Text, not Rich Text. Format, Make Plain Text. That should prevent the icons from pasting instead of the text.