Listomator – Powerful Yet Simple Text List Manipulator [Mac]

Hands down, Listomator is the only application I’ve seen so far that does what it does. None of the word processors that I’ve used in the the past can come close to it. But that isn’t a fair comparison since they’re not even in the same class of application. If you’re wondering what I’m going on about, allow me to explain.

Listomator is a Mac application that can — simply put — manipulate text lists in so many ways — and then some more. Listomator has a feature which I direly needed — to reverse the order of every item in a list. I thought it was a very trivial task but was stumped when neither Pages nor any of the other text editors I had could do it. It wouldn’t surprise me if you launched your favourite text editors right at this moment to check if they are equipped with this feature.

There are so many different capabilities in Listomator that even I have no idea where to begin. But let’s start with one of its simplest, Sorting. Listomator has the option to sort list items alphabetically (in both ascending and descending order), by item length (by number of characters) and by second word (according to the first letter of the second word in the item).

Besides that, Listomator provides you with the option to:

• Reverse the order of items
• Reverse the letter order of each item
• De-duplicate the list (removes duplicate entries)
• Trim entries (removes any spaces from the beginning and end of each item in the list)
• Advanced selection (selects every nth items in the list)
• Removes invalid emails
• Advanced filtering – using wildcards, you can filter items beginning with a particular letter; a specific sequence of letters (for example, to search for items with the “pre” in them); or words ending in a certain letter. The help file is very concisely put together to assist you in learning more about advanced filtering.

To help you visualize and put everything together, here’s a screenshot of the main window.

What say you we take a short tour of the app? To use Listomator, your list has to be in plain text. Alternatively, you could select and copy your list to the clipboard (the formatting doesn’t matter in this case). Upon launching the app, it will show the ‘Open file…‘ window, and here’s where you need to select your text file. If you’ve copied your list to the clipboard, then you can safely close this window and start a new worksheet by click on File->New. Paste your items in by pressing the “Add items from clipboard to list” button.

Either way, you should have a new list window displaying your items. Here’s mine. It’s a list of my published articles. Currently, it’s in chronological order according to their publication date. Everything’s about to change in a moment. Keep your eyes peeled.

With a click of a button, I’ve instantly reversed the order of the entire list.

And now, I’ve reversed the word order. OK, it looks kind of scrambled so I’ll just reverse the word order again and bring it back to normal.

Here, I arranged the list alphabetically.

And then, by item length. I think you get the drift by now. I’m just trying to show you that it’s incredibly simple to use. Everything I’ve done here only required a click of a button. That’s one click.

Lastly, I’ve selected every second item. Note that I can also invert the selection.

Exporting the list will depend on how you initially loaded it. If you opened a text file, then you can choose to save it. If you pasted it from the clipboard, then the only option is to copy it back to the clipboard. Currently, there’s no way to create a new text file, I’m afraid. I suspect that it doesn’t work properly in Snow Leopard. I’ve recently contacted the developer to confirm this. Nevertheless, it’s not what you call crippled.

Listomator is free and operates on Tiger and Leopard (officially). This is an app that literally has countless uses for it.

What do you think? Is there a text editor that can perform half as many functions as Listomator? I’d love to know. Maybe I’m missing something here.