inkytonik

I've investigated a bit further. It turns out that the Calendars setting in the Security & Privacy preferences *is* vital. If I go to that preference setting I see Things.app and iTerm.app and both are enabled. If I disable iTerm.app then the mdfind shell command listed above fails to find anything in ~/Library/Calendars. In other words, with the permission turned off for iTerm mdfind run in an iTerm behaves as it does from within an Alfred workflow. So, this seems to indicate strongly that Alfred needs to be given permission to access Calendars for mdfind so that it can find all of the events. Since Alfred doesn't appear in the list of apps under the Calendars setting now, I can't turn that permission on. Will it be necessary for Alfred to request that permission somehow?

Thanks for the prompt response. I checked the Privacy settings. Alfred *does* have access to Contacts and Reminders. However, it doesn't have access to the Calendar which is the aim of my query above. Unfortunately, I can't see how to add that permission to test whether it makes a difference. Alfred doesn't appear in the Apps panel for Calendar under the Privacy settings (I also tried dragging the app in). Does that mean that this permission is irrelevant to Alfred?

Thanks. I thought of the profile as well. Checked the environment in both places but I couldn't see anything missing or present that I thought could be causing this behaviour.

I'm trying some workflows that use mdfind directly. E.g., I have a trial one that does a bash script: mdfind "kMDItemContentType == com.apple.ical.ics.event" >log.txt Unfortunately, when I use this command in the script filter the contents of log.txt are different from the results that I get when run the same mdfind command from a normal shell. Can anyone explain why there is this difference? How can I avoid it? In this case the results I actually want to find are missing when the workflow runs the command :-( thanks, Tony

Yes, you're right, Tyler. Adding the negative conditions to a custom "open" workflow via the Advanced tab of the file filter is a pretty good solution actually.

Thanks for your response, Andrew. Adding the blacklist possibility to file filters is a good enhancement.

At the moment when I perform a file search I get a lot of results that I'm not interested in seeing. Primarily these are by-products of compilation of programs. E.g., Java class files. My understanding is that the current version of Alfred v2 provides a few ways in which specific file types can be excluded: * Under "Features | File Search" there is the "Don't Show" section. The problem here is that the categories not to show are hard-wired and don't cover all of the cases that are a problem for me. Also, it's not immediately obvious what types are covered by categories such as "Source Files". * Spotlight can be told not to index particular directories. This is fine if the files you want to exclude occur in obvious directory hierarchies and are not accompanied there by files you *do* want to index. That is not the case for me. E.g., Java class files occur all over the place in my HOME directory and are co-located in project directories with files such as source code or documentation which I do want to index. * A custom workflow to replace the default file search. In a file filter it is possible to specify which file types should be included. Unfortunately, the types I want to include are more numerous than the ones that I want to exclude. I am currently forced to specify all of the "include" file types which is tedious and error-prone since I may never know that I've left something useful out. It would be much easier to specify "exclude" types since I can always add to that list later without running the risk of missing things. Am I missing another method that would do what I want? If not, I would like to suggest that an explicit configuration option be added to file filters to allow specific file types to be excluded by the filter. thanks, Tony

Sounds great, thanks Andrew.

Ok, I won't add to his burden then!

Thanks for your reply. Custom workflow actions may be useful in the general case, but it would be a smaller step to provide a way to pass script filter results to the standard set of file actions (on the assumption that the results are actually file paths). Anyway, it's a pity since I've been waiting for v2 to get more customisable filtering. E.g., "one level deep filtering" is something I would like to use a lot. It's tantalisingly close now... Is it worth me submitting a feature request for the file-specific case of custom actions?

I'm writing script filters that return file results in the XML format described elsewhere in this forum (example below). The filter works fine in that I can invoke it in Alfred and I see the correct results presented by Alfred. I expected to be able to manually use right-arrow to invoke actions on the results. Unfortunately, the right-arrow doesn't seem to have any effect. I can wire up a specific action in the workflow and that works, but I'd like it to be manually specified. (BTW, I have also tried file filters and they allow manual actions to be performed on their results. However, file filters are not general enough to do some of the things I would like. E.g., just return the files that are one level deep in a particular directory. Hence I am trying the more general script filters.) Can anyone help? Is there some way to manually action script filter results or is this not supported? PS. Example of results: <?xml version="1.0"?> <items> <item arg="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-1.3.0" uid="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-1.3.0"> <title>kiama-1.3.0</title> <subtitle>/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-1.3.0</subtitle> <icon type="fileicon">/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-1.3.0</icon> </item> <item arg="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile" uid="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile"> <title>kiama-profile</title> <subtitle>/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile</subtitle> <icon type="fileicon">/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile</icon> </item> <item arg="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile.save" uid="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile.save"> <title>kiama-profile.save</title> <subtitle>/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile.save</subtitle> <icon type="fileicon">/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-profile.save</icon> </item> <item arg="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-rwtypes" uid="/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-rwtypes"> <title>kiama-rwtypes</title> <subtitle>/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-rwtypes</subtitle> <icon type="fileicon">/Users/asloane/Projects/Kiama/repos/kiama-rwtypes</icon> </item> </items>