bogdansrc

Is there some way to disable this behaviour? I'd like to activate the Dash workflow only when I begin my Alfred query with "dash". I got lots of docsets so the workflow is activated too often for my taste.

 

I'm using Alfred 3.0.3 and Dash 3.3.1.

 

Thanks.

This should cause Dash to stop modifying the workflow:

1. Quit Dash

2. Right click the workflow in Alfred and choose "Edit Details" and set the Bundle Id to anything other than "com.kapeli.dash.workflow"

3. Modify the workflow and delete the extra keywords you don't want

4. Relaunch Dash

I just discovered that the shift key is supported in many url-oriented workflows for previews.

 

like this movie and tv search (if you hit shift while having a movie selected it shows the movie poster and description)

 

Since the HTML is there, would be really nice if in addition to the "CMD to open in browser" it could support "shift to preview".

Quick Look (Shift to preview) is supported in Dash 3.3.0 with Alfred 3.

Fullscreen apps are different from spaces.

There's no way for me to prevent Dash from changing the space from a fullscreen app when it's launched. You could try setting Dash to the HUD window style mode or set it to Assign to... > All, but I'm not sure that would work.

My recommendation would be to keep Dash open

@vitch It's not normal not to have the "Assign to..." option in the dock. Do this:

1. Open at least 2 spaces

2. In Dash's Preferences > General make sure "Dismiss main window when I activate a different app" is disabled

3. Make sure Dash's main window is open and right click the dock icon again

I'm not able to view the video you made. I keep getting this: "The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.". Can you upload it somewhere else?

The only way I'm able to replicate this is if I right click on the Dash icon in the Dock and go to "Options > Assign to... This Desktop" and after that the desktop/space is changed whenever Dash launches, which causes Alfred to be left behind on the old space. Without setting that option I'm not able to replicate it.

@vitch can you check if you have this option enabled? If yes and this is the behaviour you want, there's nothing I can do on my end to get the Alfred window to relocate to the new desktop/space after it's changed by the Dash launch. The only thing I can do is to make sure Dash launches on your current space/desktop, which seems to work fine as far as I can tell, as long as it's not assigned to a certain space. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to prevent an app from changing the active space at launch when that option is enabled.

@Andrew Maybe you can watch for space change notifications and move the Alfred window when that happens?

It's actually not <copy></copy> but <text type="copy"></text>. I got confused. For more info: https://github.com/shawnrice/alfred-documentation/wiki/Alfred-XML

 

As for the autocomplete, it was just an idea. I like how it behaves on sublime text. But the ability to paste the full syntax and not just the function's name would definitely be good.

On the other hand, I do think it would be very doable to have the autocomplete feature in sublime text. Their snippet scheme is very straightforward (http://docs.sublimetext.info/en/latest/extensibility/snippets.html) and all language docs have easily identifiable syntax fields and they share some syntax themselves: return_type function_name ( required_var [, non_required_var = default_value] ).

 

What do you think?

Again, Dash is not about autocomplete. Dash is about docs. This is something your IDE should do, not Dash.

And what about pasting with syntax? Most, if not all, documentation pages have a very clear "syntax" section for each construct.

And even beyond all that, what about pasting a "dynamic" syntax in sublime text? Like after pasting, pressing tab iterates through the fields to modify.

Are you trying to replace your IDE's autocomplete with the Dash workflow?

If you have any other feature suggestions, let me know. I'm happy to add new things.

Is there a modifier or way that I'm missing to just search for and paste in a code snippet from Dash?

I know there is a profile inside Dash called "Search Snippets" that restricts searching to snippets only and setting that inside dash seems affect what the dash keyword returns in Alfred. The think is sometimes I want to search Dash's docs and sometimes I want to search Dash's snippets.

Maybe a separate keyword?

The default action is to paste the snippet, so there's no modifier required for that.

You can add "keyword triggers" to search profiles within Dash and any keyword you add will also be available in the Alfred workflow. For instructions on how to add keywords to search profiles, see http://kapeli.com/dash_guide#searchProfiles.

I've noticed that Dash loses my search hotkey every time I update. This is a minor gripe, but could Dash preserve the hotkey I set by copying it to the workflow it generates?

 

Thanks for an excellent app with stellar Alfred integration

This is a known bug and it should be fixed in the next bug.

Just to make sure it's not a different bug: what do you mean by "every time I update"? What do you update? Dash or Alfred? Did you find any set of steps which when performed will cause the hotkey to be lost?

To expand & copy snippets I need to get a callback to Dash. Pressing CMD+C doesn't do that.

Due to the dynamic nature of the Dash Alfred workflow, I can't allow customisable modifier keys without making a separate interface for that inside Dash, which I won't at least for now.

I haven't tried to think that one through and it's 5am here and I'm fighting mosquitoes but : what about a full function auto snippet ? Say I'm looking up "js split", and on enter (+modif. key), it pastes ".split(separator)".

That's not possible. Dash just displays doc pages, it has no notion of .split syntax or how to use it or generate code for it.

Great news! Andrew just sent me a beta build of Alfred which adds support for workflows to define custom subtexts based on modifiers.

I'm going to start adding support for this today and it should be part of the next update of Dash.

Modifiers and actions I'll implement

1. CMD - open in browser (for doc pages) and expand & paste (for snippets)

2. ALT - copy result name (for doc pages) and expand & copy (for snippets)

3. No idea. What else?

@Shawn: hidden features is not something I am willing to spend time on. Sorry.

The alternative is to not do anything and wait for when I can do it properly. Users get annoyed by half-baked features, while very few get annoyed by missing features.

Snippets are currently opened in Dash when you press Enter in Alfred, and if you press Enter again (while in Dash) they get expanded. It's just one extra key press. If I'd make it so that you can only expand snippets from Alfred, I'd get complaints from users that want to find a snippet to edit it or do something else.

Right, got you.

Why not add the help text under the result:

My Snippet

Snippets — ENTER to view, CMD+ENTER to expand

That wouldn't look so nice

Sure you can. I do it in this workflow (I'm assuming you generate info.plist programatically).

In the connections dictionary in info.plist you can change the modifiers (1048576 is CMD, IIRC) and the modifiersubtext to Copy to Clipboard or whatever.

Dash returns results of 2 types: snippets and doc pages. What you describe allows me to define a global modifier subtext, while what I need is to define different modifier subtexts based on the result type.

I'm gonna surf this wave of responsiveness from you, @bogdansrc, and ask something else that's been bothering me : it would be really cool to be able to copy the name of a function right from alfred. 

Often I'm looking up the correct spelling or the full name of a function and I'd just want to copy that...

I'd love to add that, as well as some other actions, like direct expand for snippets. The problem is that I can't define subtitles for when a modifier key is pressed. So this means that when you have a search result selected in Alfred and you press CMD, I can't change the subtitle text to "Copy name of function" or whatever.

@Florian I just pushed an HTML Entities cheat sheet to Dash. You can find it in Preferences > Downloads > Cheat Sheets

Never did figure out a way around that.

Might be worth a try: double-pass encode the values. So for example " " would become "&nbsp;"

Cheat sheets are awesome ! When will we see one for HTML special characters?

I guess whenever someone will make one . Instructions can be found at https://github.com/Kapeli/cheatset#readme.

Dash 2 has been released and it improves the Dash Alfred workflow by dynamically defining keywords. This means that you can now search using "css {query}" instead of "dash css:{query}".

This is beautiful. Both the app and the workflow. I find myself constantly working away from any internet and this is awesome. 

 

1. It would be very useful to be able to restrict the search to a specific language. For example when I search "floor" that exists in pretty much every language, I'd like to have "dash php floor" restrict the search of "floor" to "php".

 

 

2. And in the same vein, but further again, it'd be really cool - and yes it's quite the bit of work - to have keywords for each API for restricted searches (example: "js" instead of "dash js", "php" instead of "dash php"). 

 

3. Also, is it possible - and if not can you make it so? - to search dash for other things than the actual functions? For example, if I forgot "strlen" in php, I might type "dash php string length" and find "strlen". That would really be great.

 

Keep up the good work. Already bought the app

 

Edit: oh well, request 1 and 2 are already taken care of in the alternate workflow posted in this thread

1 & 2: Dash allows keywords for each docset (see http://kapeli.com/guide/guide#docsetKeywords) or for collections of docsets (using search profiles - see http://kapeli.com/guide/guide#searchProfiles). The correct format would be "dash php:{query}". You can also change the workflow itself so that you can search for "php {query}" directly. This is explained in the workflow's README.

You can also use https://github.com/willfarrell/alfred-dash-workflow, which I think you already found.

3: That's Google's job, not Dash. Dash is for "I want to read the docs for X", when you know exactly what X is or at least have a pretty good idea. For when you have no idea what a function is called or what you need to do, you should Google. This is because no matter how much I'd try to allow searches like the one you described, Dash will never be even remotely as good as Google (or any other search engine).

And one more thing, it turns out that the display of "Nothing Found" is really annoying because in that case I want nothing to be returned to alfred so that I can run my google default search simply by pressing enter.

I agree. I don't use search fallbacks, so I didn't notice this. Dash won't return "Nothing Found" anymore in the next update (version 1.9.2). Thanks for the feedback!

Are there any current work arounds to make it expand by default?

Nope, sorry.

If you search for something with a special character in it (i.e. $), this workflow will not match any results.

 

I.e: http://cl.ly/image/3m1e0N0k3r1e

 

When I try to find this item by searching for `$eq`, I get: http://cl.ly/image/051d1u2S352e

 

Are special characters being escaped?

Thanks for letting me know about this!

I think I fixed it. Redownload the workflow from kapeli.com/DashAlfredWorkflow.zip

Andrew, please make it happen.

Just a minor update: Andrew confirmed he'll look into it for Alfred version 2.0.4. Hopefully he'll decide to add it.

There is http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/1919-dash-documentation-for-80-apis/, but it's an workflow that integrates with Dash (paid app).