Vero

@trooncolin Do you still have access to your old Mac? As @deanishe asks, were you syncing your preferences (e.g. Dropbox) or not? We can then help you with where to look for your preferences You'll also need to activate your Powerpack license as this isn't transferred from one Mac to another. Cheers, Vero

@stoyle The objective isn't to get you to switch account, just to narrow down where and when the issue occurs. We've so far established that 1. It's seemingly not caused by Accessibility if other features that require it are working, 2. It's exclusively on your primary user profile, 3. it isn't caused by secure entry being locked by third-party apps (at least not visibly). Given this is usually a very straightforward feature to enable, and issues are normally solved by resetting accessibility permissions, I'm at a bit of a loss. At this point, the kind of debugging that is needed is, as suggested before, to quit all apps and disable any that are set to launch at startup automatically. Restart, and go straight to TextEdit, and try again. No opening browsers that may have plugins, etc. Could you also email to info@ your snippet collection and your Diagnostics file (which you can get by typing "?diagnostics" into Alfred) so that I can take a further look without asking you to share details publicly? Cheers, Vero

@stoyle Unless I'm missing something glaringly obvious because I've got Friday brain, I just can't think why this wouldn't work for you... Could you please temporarily create a new user account on your Mac, activate your Powerpack and set up accessibility & snippets there? I appreciate that's a little more time consuming troubleshooting, but I just want to confirm that on a vanilla account on your Mac, you're able to use snippets normally. Let me know how you get on. Cheers, Vero

@stoyle Thanks for the answers: What this confirms is that it doesn't appear to be an accessibility permissions issue then. Could you confirm exactly what you're typing into TextEdit for your snippet? And could you open the Auto Expansion Options in the top right, and check you don't have any apps other than Alfred and Alfred Prefs in the "Don't expand snippets in..." area?

Oh, how wise you are They really do use any excuse to avoid looking at the underlying issue and push back to being a third-party's fault... It's the first time I hear of this, but it's very interesting! I'll keep in mind the alternative "test" (the accented characters via long press) for users encountering that issue. Maybe ever so slightly off-topic but very useful. Much appreciated. Cheers, Vero

@stoyle A few more questions to help establish what the current status is on your Mac: Can you please try using Alfred's Clipboard feature? Open a new file in TextEdit, pop up Alfred's Clipboard History and press return to paste to the frontmost app. Does this work? If so, Accessibility does work, and the issue is specific to snippets How about using system commands like Screen Saver and Lock? Do these work? If you open Alfred's preferences to the Snippets prefs, do you see a red "secure entry" error message when trying to expand text? This will be a telling sign of whether a third-party app is interfering, or whether the permissions are deeper in macOS. Do you have any other keyboard manipulation or snippet apps running on your Mac? Please do any testing in TextEdit only, not in apps like Sublime Text and iTerm, as both of these have their own clipboard manipulation as well. Let me know how you get on Cheers, Vero

@johanalfred You'll have to do some detective work on your own Mac. The error message usually makes it easy to identify which application has locked secure input. If Alfred reports that "loginwindow (or a random process number) seems to be preventing text expansion by locking secure input", it's likely that macOS is unable to tell which application is using secure input. This can be because macOS itself has left the secure input enabled (e.g. when you've recently logged into your Mac, or after waking your computer and typing your password). This can be resolved by restarting your Mac, or logging out fully and logging back in. Try launching a minimum number of apps/services on your Mac, and re-launching apps one by one, allowing you to establish which app or service is locking secure input by process of elimination. Note that browser plugins (e.g. password managers like Bitwarden and LastPass) can be the cause, so enable plugins one at a time to test them. Cheers, Vero

@johanalfred This issue occurs when an app enables secure input in macOS (e.g. to give you the ability to type into a password field or other private field without other apps being able to monitor your keypresses for the purposes of snippet text expansion), but the app doesn't release it properly when it's done. If you're unable to expand your snippet, first, try re-launching the appropriate app. If the issue occurs again/frequently and BTT keeps showing up there, you may benefit from contacting them as they may have recently changed something where it doesn't release secure entry as it should. Cheers, Vero

@T'hain Welcome to the forum This is possible with the Powerpack, so if you could please fill in your Powerpack email address in your forum profile, I'll be happy to help you create a workflow to do this. Cheers, Vero

@Sucesso This is very strange, we've never seen this! Could you please try selecting Alfred in the Accessibility permissions and pressing the minus symbol to remove Alfred from the list altogether? Are you able to do so? This is undoubtedly down to an issue in macOS rather than in Alfred, but I'll be very interested to hear the outcome. Cheers, Vero

@James Senecal This looks like a permissions issue on your Mac, causing Alfred to be unable to write to disk to save the option you're checking. If you're not syncing, you can repair permissions by following the instructions here: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/preferences/ If you're syncing, please let me know what service you're using as this may play a part in the issue you're experiencing. Cheers, Vero

@James Senecal Could you give more details? What do you mean when you say your snippets are locked? Do you sync your preferences? If so, what sync service are you using? If you can please provide more information, we'll be able to help you further Cheers, Vero

@Yajee For future reference, you can find all of the formatting for these more advanced date placeholders on the this Unicode page: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr35/tr35-31/tr35-dates.html#Date_Format_Patterns Excellent when you need to create a snippet that's a little out of the ordinary Cheers, Vero

@tiptronic Could you show us what Alfred window appears? E.g. is it the default search bar or one of the secondary views, such as the File Actions? I'm wondering if you've set something in a workflow or preference to use that as part of a hotkey combo... While this may not give me the full picture (e.g. if it's triggered by a third-party app), could you email your Diagnostics file to info@ and I'll take a look? You can get your Diagnostics file by typing "?diagnostics" into Alfred. Cheers, Vero

@stoyle Could you please make sure that Alfred is fully removed from Accessibility using the minus symbol (not just unchecked), then re-added? Next, please take a look at the troubleshooting steps for snippets here, ensuring that you test using TextEdit, as it's the simplest most native app: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/snippets/#no-expansion Please provide more details if your issue persists so that I can help you further (e.g. what are your settings in all the locations highlighted by the Troubleshooting, whether this worked previously and what has changed on your Mac since, etc) Cheers, Vero

@smclean Alfred 1.2 is a classic/legacy version. You can delete it and install Alfred 4 for free from https://www.alfredapp.com Apple have moved the Apps folder around over the years, and Alfred 1 isn't aware of this, so updating to Alfred 4 will take care of all that for you (as well as offering more features and better support for current macOS versions!) Cheers, Vero

@Foxy Alfred should work in Parallels, but hotkeys may not be passed through from your Mac to your Parallels instance. You can either take a look at Parallels' documentation, which may provide more details on how to pass through hotkeys to your Parallels environment, or you can access Alfred by clicking the bowler hat in your menu bar to show him. Cheers, Vero

When you see this, could you open Activity Monitor and do a sample process? If you share the output, we might be able to see what’s happening on your Mac.

@ppolang If you open Alfred's Workflows preferences and drag the workflow to the sidebar, does it show you the import details instead of the error message? Are you using a third-party unzipper of some sort that may be manipulating the downloaded file? This is the most likely root of your issue. Cheers, Vero

By design, we don't manipulate your input; What you might think is convenient (removing trailing spaces) will likely break someone else's work flow (or their workflows too!) Spotlight is limited to search and Safari is limited to URLs, so they're very much single-purpose fields, while Alfred's input box can be used for much more.

@brad parks Are you sure it isn't just that the first line of the text you're pasting is showing "above" your content and the trailing new line is causing you to only see the blank row? For example, I've copied from your post the following: "Thanks, [newline]" So in Alfred, I see the following when pasting: The text and the new line is there, but the word "Thanks," is not visible as I've pasted more than one line. Spotlight just seems to remove the new line. Can you describe what you're trying to achieve specifically? Cheers, Vero

@geiras In this user's case, they wanted to use a URL very similar to the original web search, so performing a web search allowed them to find out the basic URL structure. If you want to easily duplicate searches, your best bet is to create a workflow containing all your Jira-related searches, as you'll then be able to either use a single object or duplicate objects as needed. Let us know if you need any help Cheers, Vero

@Chris Messina Thanks for the reminder! Been meaning to update this a bajillion times, but when I come to the forum, I just crack on with answering questions and forget every time. I've just updated it to be light grey instead so should be easier to read

Thanks to you both for confirming that's all it was - looks like macOS is losing resolution of permissions, so I've updated the title so that this thread can be useful to anyone who finds it in the future Cheers, Vero

@tvil @Jezper Could you please both open System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility? Unlock the padlock, then remove Alfred completely (using the minus symbol, not just by unchecking the box) then re-add Alfred 4 to have Accessibility permissions. This will re-set Alfred's permissions and ensure that macOS remembers that Alfred is allowed to perform actions such as auto-expansion. Could you both let me know how you get on? Cheers, Vero