Hi all,
I’m writing a novel and always eager to find alternatives to the word “said” when attributing dialogue to a character. I’ve created my own list of more expressive, original and evocative terms and I’d like to create a PopClip extension that I could invoke after, for example, selecting the word “said” which create a pop-up menu of my alternatives that I could select and automatically replace the word. Bonus points for being able to categorize the synonyms in terms of tone. This seems like an easy thing to do - even with snippets - but I’m a novice coder and both Claude and ChaptGPT have wasted hours trying to do this for me. Any help would be really appreciated!
Thanks
If you post your list some enterprising person might be able to have a go at it.
Actually, I combed through old posts and found someone who created an extension to do something similar, except theirs used ChatGPT to find synonyms. I fed that extension’s package files to ChatGPT which quickly learned it was using old syntax and plists instead of jsons and shell scripts. It fixed mine up accordingly and it works nicely. Happy to share with anyone who’d like it. I have such a love/hate relationship with AI chatbots!
Hey @wassie,
I did something like this, maybe you can use it as a starting point. Or maybe just use it as it is. It’s here under the name “Rephrase”.
What it does is ask ChatGPT for 5 synonyms or replacements for any string of characters. If you use it on the word “said” it will provide 5 other choices.
EDIT: I just saw your previous response. Were you referring to my extension? 
It absolutely was your extension. Thank you. I showed it to Chat and, after an hour of getting it all wrong, it finally realized how to write modern syntax for PopClip, thanks to you. I’m also using yours side by side with mine now. I feel like Scrivener (& Final Draft) should have this functionality built in. I know there’s a thesaurus, etc. but this is a much more efficient way to go. Thanks for your help. I’d still be banging my head against the monitor had I not found your great extension.
You’re most welcome. I didn’t realize there was a modern way of doing things, I’ll look into it!
Maybe “modern” isn’t the correct term. Perhaps “correct” would be more apropos. Basically it was using .plists for the Config file instead of JSON and extension.js files instead of shell script files. And, I, went along with that for a couple of hours because I don’t know any better.