List Filter - match items that contain Parentheses ( )

[luckman212]

Specs

• macOS 10.15 (19A602)
• Alfred 4.0.5 [1118]

I've got a List Filter in a workflow that contains an item named "foobar (baz)". I want to be able to select this item by matching on the word "baz" (in the parentheses).

 

But, when I try this, nothing is found:

 

If I remove the parens from the list item name, it works as expected.

 

Can this be fixed? The same bug also applies to other forms of brackets e.g. curly braces `{ }` and square brackets `[ ]`

Edited October 24, 2019 by luckman212

[deanishe]

26 minutes ago, luckman212 said:

The same bug

 

Technically, it's not a bug, but a deliberate implementation choice.

 

I don't really understand why, but matching is extremely (excessively, imo) strict in Alfred. The application/preferences search  has a nice fuzzy algorithm, and you can tweak the settings a bit yourself with File Filters. But otherwise, you're stuck with strict "word starts with" matching that doesn't consider dashes, brackets or any other punctuation to be delimiters.

 

You could try adding your voice to one of the many threads requesting more flexible matching in the Feature Suggestions forum.

[luckman212]

Ok. Hmm, that's a shame. Most of those threads your link points to are about "fuzzy" or searching... this is similar but not quite the same.

 

I'm not asking for the filter to match "foobar" when typing just "ba". I simply want Alfred to consider a 100% match to words that are bounded by common punctuation marks such as period, dash, parens, brackets etc. Seems like this is a much smaller leap than asking @Andrew to implement true fuzzy searching across the app.

[deanishe]

16 minutes ago, luckman212 said:

this is similar but not quite the same.

 

I understand that. I'm not stupid.

 

But there aren't any results for "brackets" or "parentheses", and "search" brings up a whole lot of irrelevant, so I thought that it would be better that you post in an existing thread on more flexible search semantics rather than open yet another one.

 

16 minutes ago, luckman212 said:

Seems like this is a much smaller leap than asking @Andrew to implement true fuzzy searching across the app.

 

It is, but they're not unrelated, are they?

 

Edited October 22, 2019 by deanishe

[Andrew]

I'm going to look at fixing this for 4.1, and also bringing across the options from the Script Filter when you select "Alfred Filters Results" for consistency.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

[luckman212]

Wow, this is wonderful news @Andrew !

I'll be at the front of the queue to test this.

 

[luckman212]

Hi @Andrew any more thoughts here? We're all the way up to 4.6 now and still can't match words inside parentheses () ... this includes snippets names as well which bit me today as I was looking for something. I hope you're still considering some improvement here, thanks

[vitor]

@luckman212 The new word matching behaviour takes punctuation into account.

[luckman212]

Thanks @vitor — I actually noticed this by accident a few days ago and was well chuffed about it! I must have missed it in the release notes.