Hedgehog

I wrote a small Hammerspoon (https://hammerspoon.org) script which will work around this issue by drawing its own text cursor at the right position when Alfred or Alfred Preferences are focused. This is done by getting the cursor position using Apple's accessibility APIs then leveraging Hammerspoon's own abilities to draw the text cursor at the right spot. -- Alfred redesigned_text_cursor fix -- -- Save this in a file named something like `alfred_cursor_fix.lua` in the Hammerspoon config folder (`~/.hammerspoon`), -- then import it from your Hammerspoon `init.lua` file: -- -- ```lua -- alfred_cursor_fix = dofile('alfred_cursor_fix.lua') -- ``` local obj = {} obj.canvas = hs.canvas.new({ x = 10, y = 10, w = 10, h = 10 }) obj.canvas:appendElements({ { type = "rectangle", action = "fill", frame = { x = 0, y = 0, w = 10000, h = 10000 }, -- text cursor color definition fillColor = { red = 0.5, green = 0.5, blue = 0.5, alpha = 1 }, } }) obj.caret_blink_timer = hs.timer.doEvery(1 / 2, function() local rect = obj.canvas[1] if rect.fillColor.alpha == 0 then rect.fillColor.alpha = 1 else rect.fillColor.alpha = 0 end end) obj.timer = hs.timer.new(1 / 120, function() local el = hs.axuielement.systemWideElement().AXFocusedUIElement if el == nil then obj.canvas:hide() return end local range = el.AXSelectedTextRange if range == nil or range.length > 0 then obj.canvas:hide() return end local loc = el:parameterizedAttributeValue('AXBoundsForRange', { length = 1, location = math.max(0, range.location - 1) }) if loc == nil then obj.canvas:hide() return end local x = loc.x if range.location > 0 then x = x + loc.w end local old_frame = obj.canvas:frame() local new_frame = { x = x, y = loc.y, h = loc.h, w = 2 } for k, _ in pairs(new_frame) do if math.floor(old_frame[k]) ~= math.floor(new_frame[k]) then obj.canvas:frame(new_frame) obj.canvas:show() -- text cursors don't seem to blink while typing obj.canvas[1].fillColor.alpha = 1 break end end end) function obj:hide() obj.timer:stop() obj.canvas:hide() end function obj:show() obj.timer:start() end -- window filter didn't seem to pick up the alfred search window so polling here instead obj.window_timer = hs.timer.doEvery(1 / 10, function() local el = hs.axuielement.systemWideElement().AXFocusedUIElement if el == nil then obj:hide() return end local app = hs.application.applicationForPID(el:pid()) if app == nil then obj:hide() return end local app_name = app:name() if app_name == "Alfred" or app_name == "Alfred Preferences" then obj:show() else obj:hide() end end) return obj

Really wish I could keep using this tweak, as I've noticed that the new language switcher behaves differently when cycling between more than two keyboard layouts - it will cycle between the last two on the list rather than the last two used ones like on previous macOS versions. For reference, this is the command to remove the tweak: sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plist redesigned_text_cursor You must reboot after running it, same as adding it.

@Andrew My source for the tweak is the Stack Overflow post I linked - it indeed does not appear to be an officially documented macOS feature, but it does revert to pre-Sonoma behavior and the only affected application appears to be Alfred. For reference, changing the theme did not help - as @luckman212 pointed out, even other parts of Alfred are affected by this.

When using the plist tweak to disable the caps lock indicator and to revert to the old language switcher in macOS Sonoma, Alfred will not show the text cursor. The plist setting is: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plist redesigned_text_cursor -dict-add Enabled -bool NO as described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/77296786 I am running Alfred 5.1.4 [2195] and macOS Sonoma 14.1 (23B74).