Chris Messina

Ok, thanks @Andrew. I've never seen it either! It only appeared after I'd just upgraded to macOS 11.5 (20G71). Will keep an eye out.

Now you know my secrets.

Odd Finder error when I use a workflow that has a "Reveal File in Finder" block: When I make my selection from the List Filter, I get this error message after several seconds: "The “Show in Finder” service could not be used because the “Finder” application did not respond to a request for services." Clicking "Show Application" caused Finder to appear several minutes later. This was the only Alfred-related message in the console: Jul 23 16:17:38 BunnySlut com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: Coalition Cache Hit: app<application.com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred-Preferences.423402080.423402086(501)> [4792] It seems like the issue has resolved itself, but I've never seen this issue before.

Yay! So glad to hear that. These themes have become my favorites too!

Ask and ye shall receive! /cc @Mr Pennyworth

OMG, that's beautiful! It also seems to have inspired the new menu design in Cloutie (a Bitclout iOS app):

Ah, wow... very interesting! However, you need a keyboard to access that eh? Would love to see a video... do you think for all the folks who might not upgrade to Monterey it still might be relevant for Alfred to add support for?

In Monterey? Or beyond? Do you have a sense for how you'd invoke it? In this case, since I'm planning to use Alfred indefinitely, it just seems like a relevant expansion but I take your point that it might be subsumed by the OS...

There is an Alfred Workflow by @Benzi called Menu Bar Search that offers this functionality (although recently broke in v1.7), but I wonder if this would be a useful addition alongside the Universal Actions feature currently in beta. Just as you can set a hotkey to bring up a list of actions relevant to your selection in Finder, supporting native Menu Items Search via a hotkey would feel consistent, since it's applying a similar "interact with my current context or selection" behavior to the currently focused app. @Andrew what do you think?

Just spotted this open source Glassmorphism CSS Generator via Product Hunt — might be a cool UI (the top bar with sliders) for achieving what I'm seeking in the Alfred Theme Editor!

Hey, if I could remap my muscle memory, so can you! Try it for a week!

Ah, helpful. Thanks for that! I think I used BetterTouchTool once before, but I haven't in some time. Useful to see many routes to achieve different levels of keyboard productivity! 🧠

For the longest time I used command-space for Alfred... but then when I found that I could activate it with a single key, and one that has an enormous tap area and that I never use (i.e. Caps Lock), I installed Karabiner Elements just for that feature. Then when I talked to Ryan Hanson about his new app Charmstone, he introduced me to his Hyperkey app (I wasn't familiar with the concept previously), and made it possible to uninstall Karabiner Elements (it's overkill for my needs) and just use his app. Then Alfred 4.5 w/ Universal Actions dropped — and previously I always struggled to learn the "pass the current selection to Alfred" keyboard shortcut, so felt like I'd been missing a lot of Alfred's power. When I discovered that I could just modify Caps Lock with Shift, the proximity and ease of access just seemed like a major benefit that brought it all together. That's why I'm excited about: there was a string of things that happened over time that not only simplifies my setup & configuration but also makes it more powerful!

Hey @AlexMartinFR — would love to create a version of this workflow for the set of Monterey themes I just released...! I thought there might be a way to make some improvements to the workflow as well... specifically dynamically generating the theme files themselves? Not really sure how — but LMK if this is of interest!

In working on my Monterey Theme pack, I realized that macOS does many more sophisticated things when rendering its UI than what Alfred allows me to control when designing my themes. I realize that keeping the theming system simple should be a goal, but nuance and consistency can be added without adding too much complexity. For example, when I right-click on an item to set its color, there is a list of "Theme colours", but these could include a submenu that includes System Colors or Dynamic System Colors: Other enhancements that could go a long way: Allow me to set a gradient on the window and Selected Result Background.¹ Allow me to access or use the AppleHighlightColor as a color variable. Allow me to control the background blur setting on the window (this setting has been deprecated) Allow me to access SwiftUI API System Colors. Allow me to access AppKit API Dynamic System Colors. Update the preview rendering to be more accurate (the Visual Effect blur effect seems to create a false rendering of the window. ² ¹ Based on a Sketch file that Apple distributes, it appears that the Selection Focus is actually a gradient with a de-saturated Background Blur: ² Compare the look of the rendered preview (which has an ugly 1px border): With the actual:

I spent the weekend making eight Monterey-inspired themes that are designed to be used with the system Accent Colors based on this request from @hootle. 👔 Download here My intention is to fork @AlexMartinFR's Mojave Alfred Accented Themes workflow to make it possible to change Alfred's theme from command palette. I looked into this process and it's more involved than I had hoped due to the obscurity of Apple's APIs for changing both the system appearance (easier) and the AppleHighlightColor (hard). If anyone wants to help me with this, let me know! Preview: Here's a quick video with instructions for syncing your Alfred theme with your System Appearance:

Thanks for your request! I spent the holiday weekend (🤓) putting these themes together. Let me know what you think! Preview:

When I duplicate a theme, the duplicate Theme Name is set to blank: However, since I'm duplicating the theme, rather than creating a new title, the duplicate should inherit the original theme's name to fill out this field. To differentiate, you could just add " copy", and then an incrementing integer for subsequent copies, as Finder does: Original Theme Original Theme copy Original Theme copy 2 Original Theme copy 3 etc It would also be nice if the "Created By" information were persisted as well.

I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with that — it's more a matter of personal preference. For me, having a single key (Caps Lock) dedicated to Alfred was a game changer; adding a modifier to Caps Lock to invoke Universal Actions is just a way to build on the muscle memory I've already developed!

I'm a fan of Ryan Hanson's apps, including Charmstone and Hookshot. He's recently released another app called Hyperkey that is insanely useful for Alfred 4.5's Universal Actions. Specifically, I use Caps Lock as my Alfred activation key. I previous used Karabiner Elements to hook up F19 to Alfred, but discovered that it was overkill for this simple use case. Hyperkey allows me to map Caps Locks to F19 as my Hyperkey, and then F19 to Alfred without all the deep system modification: Here's the crazy awesome tie-up between Alfred 4.5 and Hyperkey: if you include "shift" in your Hyperkey setup, you can now activate Alfred 4.5's Universal Actions by pressing shift and then Caps Lock... easily the easiest keyboard combo you can imagine. Of course, would be cool if Alfred enabled this natively, but meanwhile, pretty stoked about this!

I will ask.

It occurs to me that Quicksilver's Radial Menu Actions UI would be a pretty sweet solution here... i.e. make a selection (or not), tap your Universal Action hotkey and a menu system like this could appear on top of the selection (obviously modernized):

Ok, I'll give this a go, thanks!

@Andrew just playing the squeaky wheel here and bumping this request. I'm trying to re-organize a large number of snippets and the current drag and drop behavior is very unconventional. I expect moving snippets around to be similar to moving files in Finder, but there are several inconsistencies, some of which I identified in my original post. Additionally, the Snippets "Filter" interface should probably be within the Collection view, since it filters snippets in the selected group, rather than ALL snippets (which would also be useful).

Superhuman just launched variables in their snippets and they handle fill-ins pretty elegantly... they provide a few well-known variables, and then you can create your own placeholders, and if there's no set value, Superhuman will prompt you for a value: As a suggestion for a Workflow, perhaps if there's a placeholder without a value, the Alfred UI could pop asking for all the necessary variables in a sequence until all the placeholders are filled. I don't have time to tackle this right now, but it seemed like a clever way to approximate what's being requested here.