Chris Messina

Alfred 4.5 beta is now available on the in-app updater via the pre-release channel
 
Again, thanks for your help for testing this before others, and for the feedback.
 
Cheers,
Andrew

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):
 

 
 

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?
 
 

Link.

I have re-implemented ctwise's excellent implementation of the Menu Search workflow in Swift.
 
This version is ever so slightly faster (at least on my machine ) - YMMV.
 
Requires OSX 10.7+
 
↓ Download

Refer Github README page for up-to-date information.
Usage
Type m in Alfred to list menu bar items for front most application You can filter menu items by name, or do a fuzzy search.
E.g
m new tab will match the menu item New Tab m cw will match the menu item Close Window  
Setup
Note that Accessibility must be enabled for Alfred in order for this to work correctly.
 
For example, in macOS Sierra, this is configured using the Security and Privacy preference pane, under the Privacy tab with the Accessibility section selected. Alfred must be included in the list of apps allowed to control your computer. This step is required for the workflow to generate the list of menu items, and also click on a specific menu item. 
 
Here's a snapshot of what the preference pane might look like in macOS Sierra.
 

 

I've now popped a new beta build up with some fixes and improvements, available here:
 
https://cachefly.alfredapp.com/beta/Alfred_4.5_1240_beta.dmg
 
A quick summary of the changes:
Updated Script Filter JSON to now allow for overriding the arg with a new actions key to define the selected result action items See the Script Filter JSON help page for more details: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/inputs/script-filter/json/ Improved multiple argument support Improved argument type detection, including when calling from AppleScript Added new optional AppleScript "as type" so you can force to types "text", "url", and "file", e.g. tell application id "com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred" to action {"~/Desktop/", "~/Pictures/"} as type "file" Alfred will automatically detect the argument type if you don't explicitly define the type Fix Workflow File Action trigger to correctly respect the + file type tree prefixes [regression] Added Universal Actions preview panel for when there are multiple types of objects selected (will be improved in future) Improved Universal Actions view when multiple text items are selected (preview panel will be improved in future) Fix Alfred to respect WebURLsWithTitlesPboardType on clipboard when copying multiple URLs Fix fn/ctrl action tap in Clipboard view Tweak summary text on Actions Panel view Updated "Accepts Multiple" option in File Action Trigger and Universal Action Trigger to also allow for "Only Multiple Items" Various other tweaks and improvements, with detailed change log to come when the Pre-release is uhh... released.  
Thanks for all your help and suggestions so far with testing, if you could let me know if any of the things you've raised so far which should now be fixed are still not working, that would be ace
 
Cheers,
Andrew

I've used Karabiner Elements in the past, as well as BTT but for some reason the Hyper Key was always buggy (hit and miss) with them.
 
Just tried this and it works a charm, thanks!

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):
 

 
 

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!

We absolutely love and appreciate the enthusiasm you're all showing for the new features, and the possible further extension to it. 
 
If there's one thing you could do to help us make this process even better is to share your feedback in a structured and succinct way, e.g. a focused sentence or two on the feature suggestion, and a short paragraph explaining your use case.
 
Andrew and I do our best to acknowledge feedback here, by email and on Twitter, all while continuing development, providing support and doing all the boring business stuff that has to happen behind the scenes. As such, long stream of consciousness posts can be difficult to parse into actionable feature suggestions.
 
Again, thank you for your input, we love this community  
 
Cheers,
Vero

Many thanks to both @Andrew and @Chris Messina - sorry for the late reply but been very busy. I love what you have done Chris, and have imported your themes. Look great, and _exactly_ what I wanted 😀

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

 

 

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!

August 2020 edit:
 
I'm now working on a Big Sur edition of this theme collection!
To get a native look and feel, we will need one more option from Alfred's theming engine:
Round corners for the highlighted search result 🙂
 
I'm making this case in this tweet, please RT/Like if you'd like to see this happen:
https://twitter.com/AlexMartinFR/status/1292051533903863809?s=20
 
Thanks 🙏
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Hello there!
 
Here is a new Mojave & Alfred Theme Switcher workflow intended to work with a collection of theme inspired by the new macOS Mojave UI Accent Colors.
 
With the "theme" command, you can either toggle between the Dark & Light version of your currently selected theme, or switch to another Alfred Accent Color.
Just remember to install all the themes if you want to be able to try every variant!
 
I hope you'll enjoy it
 
Preview :
 

 
 
Get it here:
>>> https://github.com/AlexMartinFR/mojave-alfred-accented-themes

This would be a big help, imo. "Text" is extremely broad as types go. It would be nice to be able to have very specific actions (e.g. one that parses and processes tasks actioned in Things.app) only available at very specific times.
 
It would also be handy if Alfred didn't reset the clipboard immediately after grabbing the selection: it throws a lot of useful information away. For example, when you copy a link in many applications, they put the title as well as the URL on the clipboard. Alfred doesn't just ignore that info itself, it actively purges it.
 
I think Universal Actions would be a lot more universal if Alfred left that door to getting a richer representation of the selected data open.
 
Perhaps Alfred could only reset the clipboard after the workflow has completed (without altering the clipboard itself)?

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):
 

 
 

Great new feature, but I've encountered some issues with usability.
 
For example, I would often select text, send to Alfred, and rely on fallback searches to run a web search on that text.
 
With universal actions, the list of actions is so long that the actions I would most like to apply are far down on the list.
 
It would be useful to be able to manually sort the list of universal actions in the preferences, including which categories appear first, and to be able to manually sort the list of web searches in the preferences as well.

I might be misunderstanding you or I may not have explained myself clearly …
 
I'm talking about typing directly into Alfred's prompt, not pulling in text from a selection in the OS. I do need to explore the latter, but first I'd like to solve the former. I didn't realize how much I used that in QS until it was gone.
 
One other feature I'm missing that's directly related to text manipulation: Line breaks! It was a little cumbersome, but hitting <opt> + <return> would insert a line break into the QS input, which allowed me to queue up a multiline body of text to operate on. I used this frequently for quick notes in a meeting, coming back to it later to drop somewhere else (eg Jira, nvAlt, a slide deck, or email).

@Vero is there anything in particular that needs testing? & will there be full release notes available soon? thanks

If you weren't aware - if you are already focused on the workflow list, you can just start typing to filter that list. The focus will automatically go up to the search field.

I've just added in a ⇧⌘F shortcut in preferences which will highlight the Workflows filter field. I've actually made this global within the preferences too, so if you're not in the workflow tab, the shortcut will switch to the workflows tab, then focus the field.
 
This will be in the next release.

We agree. And holy shit, I actually implemented it myself this time!! 🏆😁

We agree. And holy shit, I actually implemented it myself this time!! 🏆😁

I totally agree with that. It’s ⌘F focussing a different field dependent on context in the same view that I think is somewhat questionable.
 
It should be a different shortcut, imo, say ⇧⌘F.

I think hotkey should enhance, because it improve productivity.
 
When active on any workflow and hotkey- ⌘ F, cursor should move to Filter input.
 
 

 
 
 
Besides, ⌘ 1-6 change tab is perfect if support it.
 
 
New ideas
 
When workflow active, I think shortkey for env setting/export/remote. like ⌘ E