If I had to pick one underused macOS feature, it would be Services. Right-click any selected text in any app, look at the bottom of the menu, and there it is. A submenu of actions that come from other apps installed on your Mac. Most people\'s Services menu has three items because nothing they have installed registers any. So they assume Services does nothing.
It does plenty. Let me show you the setups worth having.
The mental model
Services is macOS\'s way of letting any app accept content from any other app. The source does not have to know about the destination. You select text in Mail. You right-click. You pick "Look up in Wikipedia". Mail has never heard of Wikipedia. macOS routed the selection.
The same plumbing works for files, URLs, and images. You can right-click a photo in Finder, hit Services → Cartoonize, and get back a stylised version.
Setup: the one screen that matters
Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Services. This is where every Service every app has ever registered lives.
The list is organised by what kind of selection the Service accepts:
- Pictures: image files in Finder.
- Files and Folders: any Finder selection.
- Internet: URLs and links.
- Messaging: phone numbers and email addresses in selected text.
- Searching: search-related actions on selected text.
- Text: anything text-shaped.
- Development: code-shaped text.
Each Service has a checkbox (enable/disable) and a shortcut slot. Click the slot, press a key combination, and the Service is now bindable from anywhere in macOS.
Workflow 1: format JSON anywhere
Install a text tool that registers JSON pretty-print as a Service (TextLab does; many text apps do).
Open System Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts → Services → find "Pretty JSON" in the Text section → bind it to Cmd-Ctrl-J.
Now: select a one-line JSON blob in Slack, Safari, Mail, or anywhere, press Cmd-Ctrl-J, and it gets pretty-printed inline. No copy, no paste, no website.
The first time you do this and watch a 6 KB Slack message reformat itself in place, it feels like cheating.
Workflow 2: title-case the current selection
Same principle. Find "Title Case" in the Services list, bind it to a keyboard shortcut. Now you can fix up message titles, headings, and product names anywhere without going to a converter.
The dark side of this trick: it is easy to over-use Services for very simple things and then forget the shortcut six months later. Pick a few you will actually remember and stick with them.
Workflow 3: copy a photo into Photo Cartoonizer
Find an image in Finder. Right-click. Services → "Cartoonize with Photo Cartoonizer" → pick a style. The result opens directly in the app.
This is the kind of action that makes Services feel like a power-user feature. The source (Finder) does not have to know anything about Photo Cartoonizer. They just both happen to speak Services.
Workflow 4: turn highlighted text into a Shortcut input
Apple\'s Shortcuts app can run as a Service too. Build a Shortcut that takes selected text as input, does whatever, and outputs something. In the Shortcut settings, tick "Use as Quick Action".
Now your Shortcut shows up in the Services menu and can be triggered from anywhere. This unlocks combinations like:
- Highlight a city name → weather forecast in a popup.
- Highlight an address → opens in Maps.
- Highlight a Spotify share link → saves to a playlist.
- Highlight an exchange-rate calculation → runs the conversion.
You can write the Shortcut once, and from then on it is one keystroke away no matter what app you are in.
Workflow 5: kill the Services menu noise
By default, macOS shows every registered Service that could possibly apply. This makes the right-click menu enormous on a machine with many apps. Most people find this useful for a week, then stop scrolling all the way down.
Fix: go through the Services list and disable everything you do not actually use. The checkbox column is the cleanup tool. After ten minutes of pruning, your right-click menu becomes pleasant again, and the items you kept are easier to find.
The dirty secret
Services were invented for NeXTSTEP in the 1980s. The basic plumbing has barely changed since. There is no fancy server, no AI, no cloud. It is just a registry of "if you have this kind of selection, here are the apps that can handle it".
That simplicity is why it still works thirty years later. Apple has added newer mechanisms (Quick Actions, Shortcuts, App Intents), but Services is the one that lives in every menu and works with every app, ancient or modern.
It is not glamorous. It does not have a marketing page. It just sits there, waiting, in every right-click menu you have ever opened.
Go set up two of them tonight. By next week you will have shortcuts for things you used to copy-paste through three apps.