lilyball

What I'm getting it from is an Automator workflow set up as a Service. Both file input to the service, as well as the "Get Selected Finder Items" Automator action, seem to be producing these same objects.

I knew it was possible, but as someone who touches Apple Script maybe once every few years, it's very non-obvious. It would be nice if Alfred could simply handle whatever file type that Apple Script uses by default.

If I write an Automator Apple Script action like on run {input, parameters} tell application id "com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred" to action input return input end run where the input is files (either Service inputs, or the results of "Get Specified Finder Items"), Alfred opens the browse panel but with the garbage input that looks like file:/slash/separate/path%20with%20percent%20encoding.txt I can instead pass `POSIX PATH of input` and that works, but only for one file. I'm not sure how to convert a list of files into a list of paths in AppleScript. Thankfully I can do this with JavaScript instead, but the Apple Script support really should handle Apple Script files.

I'd love it if Alfred would vendor an Automator action for running external triggers. The use case here is I want to use Automator to write a Service that sends its input to Alfred. I can use Apple Script but it would be more convenient if there was an Automator action for this.

Also possibly worth mentioning, my workflow was actually triggering "Browse in Alfred". If I switch over to "Action in Alfred" (which matches what the built-in hotkey actually does) then this problem goes away, because the action panel doesn't seem to respond to tapping modifiers the way the browse panel does. Still, I like being able to browse.

Now that I’m just limiting it to the Finder it’s more reasonable to do that. In general I avoid using ⌘ in global hotkeys because I don’t want to interfere with apps. Though I ended up limiting it to the Finder specifically because ⌃⇧\ was interfering with Xcode 😅 (though to be fair ⌘⌥\ would have interfered with Xcode too). Though now that I think about it, why is this a hotkey at all, instead of a Service? A Service would mean not having to muck about with Copy to figure out my selection. And IIRC service hotkeys are overridden by app hotkeys, so using ⌘⌥\ as a default hotkey for the service wouldn’t conflict with anything.

I forgot that setting existed. It does work around my issue, but it also slows down the activation of the shortcut, which is a shame.

I have a workflow that uses a Hotkey to trigger "Browse in Alfred". I've done this instead of using the built-in support so I can restrict the hotkey to only occur in the Finder, as that's the only app I ever use this feature with and the hotkey I use conflicts with Xcode. Anyway, I just discovered a problem today, which is that Alfred interprets the flag changed events for the modifiers used by the hotkey incorrectly. As near as I can tell, it's trying to detect a quick press-and-release of the shift or control modifiers to trigger the associated behavior (quicklook or showing the action panel; I have control enabled for this behavior, I don't remember if that's a default). The problem is my hotkey is ctrl-shift-\, and if the modifiers are still held down by the time Alfred shows the panel, and I release both modifiers at the same time, Alfred will trigger one of the two behaviors (quick look or showing action panel, whichever one corresponds to the modifier that got released second). I'm pretty sure what's going on is the flags changed event doesn't actually say which flags were added/removed, it just says what the current flags are, so when the first modifier is released Alfred interprets this as the addition of the second modifier, so when that gets released it triggers the action. This is rather irritating because it means I need to be really quick about releasing the modifiers when I trigger the hotkey or else I get this weird behavior. Alfred could fix this by keeping track of modifiers as global state, instead of what it's apparently doing which is keeping track of them only when the action panel is open. Or if it doesn't want to track modifiers globally, it could at least track the modifiers involved in a hotkey to see when they go away. Or poll the system when the action panel opens to see what flags are currently active.

The workflow Open URL action only has one custom option, which is whether to use the default application or pick a specific one. It would be great if it supported the other options available when opening URLs, most notably the ability to open a URL without bringing the application forward.

Oh geeze. I completely didn't know that cog was a button. Also, I don't have "Automatically expand snippets" checked, so it seems very surprising to me to bury preferences that have nothing to do with auto-expansion in that spot, though I guess it's because it's right next to the (I assume) pre-existing "After Auto Expansion" option. Anyway, thanks!

The v3.4.1 release notes say I can't find this option anywhere. Where is it? I also don't know what "(option shared with snip keyword)" means; I tried turning off the "snip" keyword option and that didn't affect the clipboard contents.

@Andrew Excellent. I'll check that out now. Incidentally, the first line of the change log for the pre-release has a typo ("exapnsion"). As for reporting it, you could do that, but I'm honestly not sure how they're supposed to know that clipboard changes are complete. I can erase the clipboard now, then write one piece of data to it, then a bit later on add more data to the clipboard, and there's no way for me to say that I'm "done" mucking with it.

What if you call `clearContents()`, then add an artificial delay, then `writeObjects()`? As long as ownership didn't change in the meantime, could this cause Alfred to see the change count increase with nothing on the pasteboard, and then have the pasteboard populate shortly afterwards?

I just tested copying from Maps and then printing out NSPasteboard.general().types and I get the expected types. So maybe it's just something weird like there being a very short delay in between you getting notified of a change (how do you get notified anyway?) and Maps actually declaring the types properly?