Copy results of `org-export` directly to clipboard

Question

I often find myself doing this:

• Selecting a region of text in an org file.
• Calling org-md-export-as-markdown.
• Selecting the converted text in the temporary buffer (can't just do mark-whole-buffer since for these purposes I'm obviously not interested in the empty Table of Contents I get).
• Killing the temporary buffer and going back to where I was.

EDIT: Here is my question: How can I write a function that will, after selecting a region of text, do all of that for me? In other words, I want a function which will take a region from an org file, copy the result of org-md-export-as-markdown to the clipboard, and return to the org file I called the function from.

Some related attempts:

John Kitchin has a post where he does something similar to what I'm doing. But he uses texutil, since he wants the output in a format that org won't export to. I'm assuming what I need would be much simpler than that.

Oleh Krehel has a function that copies the converted html from a region as part of his emacs config (see here). But he uses xclip which I believe is not available for macOS.

Abo-abo's function is here

(defun ora-org-to-html-to-clipboard ()
   "Export region to HTML, and copy it to the clipboard."
   (interactive)
   (org-export-to-file 'html "/tmp/org.html")
   (apply
    'start-process "xclip" "*xclip*"
    (split-string
     "xclip -verbose -i /tmp/org.html -t text/html -selection clipboard" " ")))

I presume I can modify something like this by replacing

xclip -verbose -i /tmp/org.html -t text/html -selection clipboard

with

pbcopy < /tmp/org.html

but I can't quite get it to work.

My own, failed attempt so far:

This was my blind attempt at adapting the function ora-org-to-html to use pbcopy instead. (Adapting it to use org-md-export-to-markdown would be fairly straightforward, I think.)

(defun org-to-html-to-clipboard ()
   "Export region to HTML, and copy it to the clipboard."
   (interactive)
   (org-export-to-file 'html "/tmp/org.html")
   (apply
    'start-process "pbcopy" "*pbcopy*"
    (split-string
     "pbcopy < /tmp/org.html")))

Running this does create the file /tmp/org.html but the contents aren't sent to the clipboard. Further, the html file contains the entirety of the buffer I run the function from (which I gather is what the original function was supposed to do) rather than just the selected region. Finally, this function requires creating a temporary file, rather than just using the temporary buffer that org-mode generates with the *-export-as-* functions.

---

I'm completely illiterate when it comes to elisp so any suggestions, no matter how elementary they seem, would be most welcome.

Answer 1

I'm posting this here in case it helps anyone else. Following a suggestion by u/ImmediateCurve over at Reddit, I ended up with the following function, which does what I want (it uses simpleclip.el since I mostly rely on it for interacting with the system clipboard on macOS):

(defun apc/org-md-to-clipboard ()
  (interactive)
   (save-window-excursion
    (let ((org-export-with-toc nil))
      (let ((buf (org-export-to-buffer 'md "*tmp*" nil nil t t)))
        (save-excursion
           (set-buffer buf)
        (simpleclip-set-contents (buffer-string))
        (kill-buffer-and-window)
        )))))