blgentry

That is insane. That was it!!! I really like the TV and Movies workflow. It's extremely useful. I had no idea it had a bug. I followed the steps in the linked thread and BOOM, it's fixed. Thanks Vitor! Brian.

I'm currently using Alfred 5.1.3 . Sometime in the past, I think in Alfred 4, the "?" query was introduced. So I could type into the Alfred box something like "?workf" and it would match on Workflows and then open the Alfred Preferences to the workflow section. This worked for most of Alfred's pieces and parts. Sometime later (perhaps in Alfred 5?) this stopped working entirely. Now it seems to only want to search the Alfred Online Help when I do ? queries. I'm unsure if I changed something, or if Alfred changed. Any suggestions on how to quickly get to Alfred's various sections from the Alfred search box? Thanks, Brian.

I guess I'm not being much of a good Alfred citizen. I didn't link to a workflow because I'm not sure it's very good. Thanks for the screenshot technique. I've been using screenshot on Mac for quite a while, but I didn't know that spacebar would change it to take a full window and use transparency. Neat! Thanks, Brian.

I've developed a small workflow to help me manage the mounting and unmounting of my encrypted APFS volumes (disks). When I created each of these encrypted volumes, I used 1password to generate and STORE the password for each drive. My workflow is designed to identify which disks are on the system and either mount or unmount them as you choose. An important part of this is making Alfred look up the password inside of 1password and then feed it into the command to unlock the encrypted drive and mount it. The thing that makes this work is, I added a 1password TAG to each entry with the name of the drive (volume). So a drive named 3TBWD will have a tag called "3TBWD". That 1pass entry will have the password for that drive. The 1pass CLI must be installed to make this integration work. I've only had this workflow working for a short time, but it seems pretty good. I don't think it's in publishable form at the moment. I'm sure I've done some beginner things incorrectly. I also suspect very few people are interested in this. I just built it for me. Attached are a couple of screen shots. Brian.

For a while I was using a URL based search on justwatch. At some point this stopped working and just opened the site without any results and I'd have to type in my search into the search box and go from there. I guess they switched to an API based model or something? So yesterday I decided to fix it and I couldn't figure out a URL based way to do it. After some research and trials, I installed this workflow. I thought it was a little odd that I had to do through 3 steps to get to the justwatch listing. I also thought it was weird that "justwatch" kept pulling up TMDB. But then I noticed that this is a subsection of TMDB that shows all of the justwatch results embedded. Neat. Over the next half day I realized how good this workflow really is. I don't have to type the entire title as it is interactively searching while I type in Alfred. Wow. I can watch a trailer directly without going to look for it on the justwatch page. IMDB is there too for extra info. This is going to speed up my entertainment searching. I probably won't use the Alfred imdb keyword ever again. This is a really good workflow! Thanks for the work it took to create it. I'm looking forward to using it and learning more about it. Brian.

Hello, I would like to suggest that the SETUP instructions include verifying that Automation Tasks are installed. Yesterday and today I spent about an hour trying to make this work. I did a lot of troubleshooting steps, but I was unaware of Automation Tasks as being a "thing" in Alfred and they were not mentioned in the setup instructions. Today I found this thread and started reading. I'm glad that I got impatient and went to the end because my answer was there! Now that I installed Automation Tasks, the 1password integration works as I expect it to. Previously it would not show any of my entries/logins. Thanks for the workflow. I think I'll be using it a lot. Brian.

Interesting that this fuzzy python script exists. But it doesn't solve what I'm after: substring searches *everywhere* in Alfred. If this fuzzy search was an option for matching all results (like bookmarks for example), then it would really be awesome. As it is, I'm sure it's pretty neat, but you have to build your own workflow, with your own particular aims, in order to make use of it. Useful, but not what I'm currently wishing I had. Thanks, Brian.

It's nice that the plugin exists. But it's not the answer in this case Alfred is amazing. But it is lacking in the ability to search for substrings. There are many instances where searching for substrings would be very helpful. Not the least of which is the example above: Searching for word fragments in a bookmark title. It would be a really neat addition to Alfred to support substring search. Brian.

Your pattern : \w{4}$ does not work because \w means "word character". "Words" are letters and numbers. Special characters are not word characters. So the period (.) does not match. If you wanted to match an 4 characters at the end of a line you could do: ....$ OR .{4}$ Note that "." , in regex, means "any character" so it matches on everything: letters, numbers, specials, etc. Even a literal period. Regex is odd. Regex is a bit confusing. But it's also quite powerful. You might enjoy using this regex checker/tester/tool: https://regex101.com

I've tried Karabiner Elements two or three times now. It's awful compared to Alfred. For really simple things, it's no so bad. I'm pretty sure I've swapped caps lock and control with it. But for anything beyond dead simple you need to edit JSON files. Which I can do; but it's rather ugly and seems poorly documented. I very much appreciate you trying to help me. To be honest, I really don't even need this thing I'm asking for. I can just use Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Display and change the brightness keys to F11 and F12. I've just done it now in fact. I'm still curious though if Alfred can do what I'm looking for. Alfred is kind of 4 or 5 apps all in one. I'm already using it for a handful of different keys that do various actions and remaps. Brian.

My task is simple: I want my external keyboard to change brightness on my M1 Mac's built in screen. Unfortunately my external keyboard will not send the F14 or F15 keys that are required to change brightness. The "Fn + F1", which works to do F14 on most keyboards, doesn't work on this one. So I'd like my F11 key to send F14 instead. I'd like to have Alfred see F11 as a hotkey trigger and then output F14. But if I can't type F14, how do I make Alfred dispatch the key combo? Is there a way to enter a keycde instead of pressing the actual key? Or something similar? I have also looked into the various workflows that set or adjust screen brightness. The useful ones use a command line program which calls a particular method used on Intel based Macs, but they DO NOT WORK on M1 Macs yet. So that avenue appears to be closed for me. As a last resort I can plug in a different keyboard that I sometimes use with this Mac in order to do the F14 and F15 and have Alfred capture them. It just seems like a product as cool and advanced as Alfred would have a better way. Thanks for reading, Brian.

Oh wow. I didn't even need to configure anything. My fedex, ups, and usps keywords all work as universal actions and are (of course) searchable in the universal actions area. So this was a really a case of just starting differently: Start with the clipboard history and then feed it to an action (keyword). As opposed to starting with the keyword and then trying to feed in some clipboard history. Nice! Thanks for your help. Brian.

Let me illustrate my question. Let's say I've just copied a couple of things to my clipboard. One of them (not the last one) was a FedEx tracking number. In my Alfred web search setup, I have a keyword for fedex tracking that takes a tracking number as an argument. So, I activate Alfred and type "fedex" and then go to paste in my number. But it's back in my history, so I use my hotkey for clipboard history to bring that up. I easily find my tracking number in history and press enter. Poof, the Alfred box goes away and I have... nothing? My clipboard history took over the alfred query and killed my fedex keyword query. That's not what I wanted. I activate alfred again and this time do a normal paste because my tracking number is the most recent thing in my clipboard history. That works, but it's awkward and "slow". Is there a way to paste clipboard history items into the regular alfred box as an argument? That would be neat. Brian.

If you use SSH all the time, tmux will change your life. I keep between 4 and 10 SSH sessions going all the time. But my computer isn't always connected to them. I run tmux on an internal server at work. I SSH or MOSH to the internal server. Then run "tmux attach" to access my tmux session. Then I can see all of my SSH sessions, exactly like I left them. Tmux supports splits as well, so you can have your stacked layout if that's what you really like. I find it easier to navigate from session to session with tmux commands, but you could do either, or a combination. The key point here is you don't need to keep opening many sessions. Tmux will keep them open for you. ...and it will keep you exactly where you were when you last saw them. Even if you were running an interactive program like top or vim, or a compile or a shell script. Tmux keeps every session alive. When you get back to work and attach, you see the current state. This is also great for working remotely or changing work sites. All of your stuff is always in the same place, all ready to go. Brian.

After more testing, I've determined that Alfred still opens Bookmarks in a new tab as opposed to a new window. This is understandable from a technical perspective. But it's undesirable from a interface consistency perspective. I've been meaning to give Safari a real try for a while. I might just take this as the reason to do it and switch to Safari and see if I miss anything from Chrome. Brian.

Is that as simple as just typing those words (http, https) into the name of the handlers that appear in the URI area? See screen shot. I did that, created the app in /Applications, launched it, but still see no new entries in Preferences > General > Default Web Browser. I feel like I'm missing something simple. Thanks again, Brian.

I spent a good bit of time on this and... Platypus main web site is down, but you can get a binary from MacUpdate or similar sites, which I did. Created a new app using your script above. It works. However, it does not register itself as a web browser with MacOS. I tried a bunch of things inside of the "accepts dropped items" area as per this StackExchange post: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42605571/how-to-register-a-python-script-with-mac-osx-as-a-web-browser I tried using "http", "http://", etc as the URI handler and none seemed to make any difference in terms of registering the script as a system wide web browser. So I did more research and found a free program called Finicky: Finicky registers itself as a browser and then has a config file that lets you tell it what browser to use under what circumstances. Like maybe you want youtube to open in Safari, but Twitter to open in Chrome, and Instagram to open in Brave. But I just made a simple default that points to my Chrome shim (cleverly named ChromeNewWindowOpen). So now when I do a default search in Alfred, it gets sent to my "default browser" named Finicky. Finicky then sends it to ChromeNewWindowOpen, which is just a script/exe that opens a new window in Google Chrome. This is a long roundabout way of getting there, but it works! I would really like to just register the shim as a system available web browser, but I couldn't figure it out in an hour of trying. If anyone has suggestions on that front, I'd like to hear them. Thanks for the help so far. I appreciate it. Brian.

Are you suggesting that I write some AppleScript (or maybe some other language) to register a fake browser named something like "Chrome New Window Opener". ... have that be a script that then does the --new-window call to the existing Chrome, so that new Chrome windows will open from Alfred? I am technical and I do a little bit of programming. I'm not educated on how I would go about this. I'm not a Mac developer. I'd be happy to install such a thing if it existed. Thanks, Brian.

I did a bunch of research on this and found several old threads about it. Most of these threads seemed to indicate that "this is a Chrome feature problem." Well, I've discovered that Chrome absolutely has the ability to open URLs in new windows. From the command line, this works to open in a new window with a URL: /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --new-window www.youtube.com It would be wonderful if this could be incorporated into Alfred. It's driving me nuts to have to break out every Alfred result from a tab to a new window. Thanks, Brian.