Official Workflow Manager

[shinzui]

Is there any hope for Alfred to release an official cli to manage workflows? It would be very convenient to have something like awm officially supported. 

[vitor]

I don’t speak for the Alfred team, but I’d say that’s unlikely to happen in the near future.

Packal is on life support (and quite frankly should be dead already, since at this points it fails more than it succeeds), so it’s not a good source to pool from. So one of two things need to happen before an official CLI tool comes to fruition:

• A new official repository needs to be built. The CLI tool will use it.
• The CLI tool will download from different sources (similar to Homebrew).
  

For the second one, there’s no point in having an official CLI tool. If you’re going to pool from sources you don’t control anyway, might as well let a third-party build such a tool. It’s also time-consuming.

For the first one, the cost is too high. You’d need to host and maintain such a repository. That can become expensive and takes a lot of time. Time and money that could otherwise be spent improving Alfred itself.

It would also not be comprehensive, since a ton of Workflows are pretty much abandoned (yet still work fine). For most of those, you’d have a hard time convincing the developers to submit to the official repository. It would also put a lot of burden on the Alfred team to make sure every Workflow is trustworthy.

I could go on and on.

So yes, it is possible. But even if it were done now, it take a good while before it’d approach the level of goodness you’re after. It’s a niche feature that very few users would take advantage of. There’s too little to gain.

[deanishe]

On 19/11/2017 at 6:18 PM, vitor said:

there’s no point in having an official CLI tool

 

If there is any kind of official action in this direction, I highly doubt it would be a command-line tool.

[iansoper]

Something to consider is how Sketch.app deals with a extension/plugins ecosystem:

 

Plugins Directory - this is the official directory for all the extension

https://www.sketchapp.com/extensions/plugins/

 

They have a github repo with json files as the source of truth for the extension directory, plugin creators are required to submit a pull request to this repo to get their extension included.

https://github.com/sketchplugins/plugin-directory

 

There is a command line utiltity to help create and publish sketch plugins (to the official repo):

https://github.com/skpm/skpm

 

Sketch maintains the list (plugin-directory), they don't host the plugin/extension files, those are generally in Git repos. They also have a good interface for turning them on, off, updating them, etc.

 

This approach has created a vibrant plugin ecosystem and users can easily find, install and keep their plugins up-to-date.