Ability to make workflows app-exclusive

[Vermoot]

Hi!

 

One feature that doesn't seem to exist but I think would be great is the ability to make workflows app-exclusive, meaning that they'd appear only when a specified app (or several) is active and in the forefront.

 

For example, I'd like to make a ProTools workflow with several automation features triggered by various keywords, like "instrument" to create an instrument track, "duplicate X" to duplicate a clip a certain number of times, etc. I'd like to be able to use these keywords by themselves and not as an argument to a "ProTools" keyword ("ProTools instrument", or "ProTools duplicate X" would be much more bothersome to use), and here's the kicker, I'd like those keywords to not appear when I'm not in ProTools. Say I'm in Safari, if I type "instr", nothing appears, nothing is suggested.

 

You'd be able to specify in the settings of the workflow which app(s) it's enabled in.

 

I hope this was clear enough, but if not I'd be happy to try and explain it better.

 

Thanks!

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, Vermoot said:

I think would be great

 

Why would it be great? I'm not saying it wouldn't, just asking for a concrete example or reason.

 

You can already implement your "instrument" workflow without needing a "ProTools" prefix keyword, so it isn't obvious what advantages app-specific Keywords would bring.

 

You can also already show a list of app-specific stuff via Hotkeys (which are already app-aware). For actions that are implemented as scripts, there's my AppScripts workflow, which gives you a list of all scripts installed for the active application.

 

[Vermoot]

The goal is to implement loads of keyword-triggered scripts without crowding Alfred when I'm not in ProTools. If I make a workflow with 30 actions each triggered by their own keyword, I don't want the 30 keywords to be suggested when I'm not using ProTools. Those are specific to it and shouldn't appear when I'm using other apps.

Edited October 9, 2018 by Vermoot

[deanishe]

Makes sense. I guess you could also use it to implement identical workflows for different apps (e.g. one for Safari and one for Chrome) that don't step on each other's toes.

 

That can actually already be achieved, though admittedly not without some indirection. Alfred already has all the necessary bits, they're just not in the right places to achieve this directly.

 

[Vermoot]

Thank you for your answer! I'll keep an eye on the changelogs, then

[CJK]

4 hours ago, deanishe said:

I guess you could also use it to implement identical workflows for different apps

 

Yes, I've wanted to do this in the past, but ran into difficulty.  Although there's the option to have a hotkey only active when a particular app has focus, this only means that the hotkey won't do anything outside of that app; it doesn't mean the hotkey is available to be used by other apps to trigger their workflows.  This is really irksome, because it severely limits the amount of hotkey "real estate" one has to play with—double tapping the Command key is such a useful trigger, but with Alfred, I can only get it to serve a single purpose (thankfully, I have Keyboard Maestro installed, so I use that to apply multiple actions to a single keyboard trigger depending on different factors).

[deanishe]

15 minutes ago, CJK said:

This is really irksome

 

Yes, yes it is. And it is, by all appearances, an arbitrary and needless restriction (seeing as both macOS and other apps like KM will happily let you assign the same keyboard shortcuts to different apps).

 

If you've set a Hotkey to only work in Safari, why won't Alfred let you use the same keyboard shortcut in another Hotkey assigned to a different application?

 

The only way to do this with Alfred, AFAIK, is to create a third workflow, assign it the Hotkey and then use the focused app variable and a bunch of Filter elements to call External Triggers in the workflows you actually want to assign the Hotkey to. Which is nasty.