Transformium

Support

Fixes for common problems, a few things worth knowing, and how to reach us.

Availability

Transformium isn't available yet. When it is, you'll be able to download both the Mac app and the Safari extension from this site, signed and notarized by Apple so they open without a warning. The home page will have the links.

Everything else on this page applies to the released version, so it's here already.

If something isn't working

The shortcut does nothing

Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Services and check that the Transformium items are ticked. macOS sometimes won't use a Services shortcut until you do.

If you changed a shortcut, make sure no other app uses the same keys. An app's own shortcuts always take priority, so a clashing combination never reaches Transformium.

It converted something I copied earlier

Transformium doesn't have the Accessibility permission, so it can't press ⌘C for you and converts whatever was already on your clipboard instead. Because that's often something plausible, it can take a moment to notice.

Turn it on in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Reinstalling or updating Transformium can switch it off again, so check it after either.

Every app's Services menu is empty

If the Services menu is empty everywhere — not just missing Transformium's items — macOS's list of services has been reset, usually by something running pbs -flush. Log out and back in and it's rebuilt. Transformium never does this itself.

“There is nothing to convert”

The app you copied from didn't put a table on the clipboard in a form Transformium can read. Some apps only offer formatted text (RTF), which isn't supported. If you think it should have worked, run transformium --list-types in Terminal straight after copying and send us what it prints.

In Safari, I get a panel with a Copy button instead

For security, Safari only lets an extension write to your clipboard straight away when you click its toolbar button. When you use the right-click menu or a keyboard shortcut, Transformium shows the result with a Copy button instead — one click puts it on your clipboard. The text is already selected, so ⌘C works too.

Safari lists three shortcuts, not two

The third opens Transformium's toolbar popup rather than copying anything. Safari gives that shortcut to every extension with a toolbar button. The popup itself shows which keys each shortcut is currently set to, and which aren't set.

Good to know

A few things Transformium deliberately won't guess at. When a document is ambiguous, it would rather tell you than hand you a table that's only half right.

  • XML and JSON: the first repeating list becomes the rows. That fits typical exports, but if your records sit deeper inside another repeating list, it may pick the wrong one.
  • JSON and XML must be strictly valid. Trailing commas, single quotes and unquoted keys aren't accepted, so a JavaScript object won't convert. Documents nested more than 128 levels deep are refused.
  • JSON keyed by ID isn't a list. {"u1": {…}, "u2": {…}} has no array in it, so it converts as a single row.
  • Markdown tables need their separator row (| --- |) under the header. Without it, ordinary text that happens to contain | would be mistaken for a table.
  • Markdown column alignment counts characters, so cells with Chinese, Japanese or Korean text, or emoji, won't line up perfectly in plain text. The table still displays correctly.
  • Line breaks inside a cell become <br> in Markdown, which some Markdown viewers show as literal text.
  • Nested values stay as JSON. A list or object inside a cell is written as compact JSON rather than split into extra columns. Empty (null) values become empty cells.

Get in touch

Questions, bug reports and suggestions: . If a conversion went wrong, include the output of transformium --list-types, run in Terminal straight after you copy — it tells us exactly what the other app put on your clipboard.