Search Scope and Search Speed

[knhn]

Hey there,

 

Thanks in advance for any help. New Alfred user.  I have added /Volumes to my search scope.  I have a thunderbolt drive connected to my machine named Little Big.  Searching for Big in Alfred does not return the obvious result that I want it to.  Can anyone help me understand what it is doing?

 

Also, doing a search for say desktop, it comes up with the screensaver settings first, then after about 2 beats it returns the ~/Desktop result.  What is with the 2 beats?  Why so slow?

 

Thanks again

 

 

[knhn]

[knhn]

[deanishe]

Adding a path is not enough. You also have to click the Advanced… button and add the type of file you want to show up, too.

 

Drag your disk into that list (which should add public.volume) and then it should show up in search results.

 

8 hours ago, knhn said:

after about 2 beats it returns the ~/Desktop result.  What is with the 2 beats?

 

That's the way search works in Alfred and why it's so fast. It shows search results as soon as they start coming in and then updates them as and when more results come in. You should get into the habit of checking the right result is selected before hitting ↩.

[Vero]

@knhn If you only search the external drive occasionally, you may benefit from creating a File Filter for it, rather than include it in your default results.

 

First, it would allow your default search to be more focused and therefore faster, as it won't need to wait for results from an external drive that may not be as quick at returning results.

 

Secondly, it would allow you to have a file filter that precisely searches the content of that Thunderbolt volume, so that when you prefix the search with the file filter's keyword, you know that results will be focused on just the content of that drive.

 

Here's how you can create File Filters:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/inputs/file-filter/#workflow

 

If you're finding that results from your primary drive are being returned slowly, you may benefit from rebuilding your Mac's metadata index. See step 4 here:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/indexing/

 

Cheers,

Vero

[knhn]

Hiya All!

 

Thanks for the replies.

 

 @deanishe  I went ahead an added the public.volume thingee to the Advanced thingee but still no luck.  For some reason I can't attach a screenshot to show you because everything must be under 51KB.   

 

@Vero  I just want to quickly pull up my attached drives and then navigate them.  Actually not searching for files.  On the flip side, i suppose this is the same with spotlight, I cannot search for the attached drives in there either.  A search for "big" there will not bring up anything useful.

 

Edited October 24, 2017 by knhn

[Vero]

@knhn If you simply want to add a keyword to pop up your Volume in Finder, create a workflow with a keyword object (set your keyword, choose "No argument")  connected to a Launch Apps/Files into which you drag your Little Big volume. You'll then be able to type the keyword and press return to pop up a Finder window opening to your volume.

[deanishe]

10 hours ago, knhn said:

I went ahead an added the public.volume thingee to the Advanced thingee but still no luck.

 

Hmm. I added /Volumes to my scope and public.volume to types and my external drive came right up.

 

10 hours ago, knhn said:

I just want to quickly pull up my attached drives and then navigate them.

 

As Vero says, you can add a specific keyword and action for your drive. If you have several drives, you might consider adding them all to a List Filter or—especially if the connected drives change a lot—setting a keyword or hotkey to run this AppleScript:

`tell application "Alfred 3" to browse "/Volumes/"`

 

That will take you straight to /Volumes in Alfred's browse mode, where you can open the drive in Finder with ⌘↩ or browse it in Alfred.