Allow App-specific Hotkeys to Use the Same Key Combinations

[Jasondm007]

At the moment, when you assign a key combination to a particular hotkey in Alfred, it keeps you from using the same key combination with a different hotkey. While this make sense in most scenarios, when the hotkey is assigned to a particular app - as specified in the Related Apps panel of the hotkey, and selecting the option that limits the hotkey to when the app takes focus - it seems unnecessary to restrict the user from using the same key combination with other apps that might have focus. As a result, I'd like to request this feature be added to Alfred. 

 

Without this ability, it causes users to have to come up with increasingly ridiculous key combinations that they can never remember (OK ... that I can never remember 😉). Or, to rely on another intermediary app - like the Better Touch Tool - to assign app-specific shortcuts that are attached to External Triggers in Alfred. BTT is great, but let's cut out the middleman and keep Alfred's shortcuts in Alfred!!

 

Thanks for your consideration!

 

PS - This request comes from a previous that can be found here: 

 

[Terminal]

[deanishe]

Big +1 from me. I have a bunch of workflows that do the same thing in different applications, and of course, I want to use the same hotkey.

[Andrew]

I'm open to implementing this.

 

One of the reasons this hasn't been a thing so far is it is much easier for users to accidentally get themselves into a confusing situation. What would you consider to be the desired behaviour if there were a hotkey conflict? (e.g. set same hotkey on two different synced macs in different workflows, which when the sync merges, they are both "valid").

[deanishe]

Ideally, show a dialog saying "workflow X and workflow Y have conflicting hotkeys" when the hotkey is pressed.

 

Or just silently delete one of them. Alfred's current behaviour when you try to set a hotkey it considers conflicting is to silently reject it, and I don't think silently deleting a hotkey on sync is any more confusing than that.

 

One way or the other, users can already shoot themselves in the foot in many different ways with hotkeys with or without Alfred. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Edited January 17, 2020 by deanishe

[vitor]

4 hours ago, Andrew said:

What would you consider to be the desired behaviour if there were a hotkey conflict? (e.g. set same hotkey on two different synced macs in different workflows, which when the sync merges, they are both "valid").

 

What’s the behaviour now? Presumably that situation is already possible, except that with the current system it would happen more often because having the same shortcut is always a conflict, while with the suggested change it might not be (if they focus on different apps).

[Jasondm007]

Thanks for your consideration, @Andrew!!

 

Not that BTT should be the gold standard, but when there's a conflict created by the user (e.g., assigning the same key combination to the same app with focus) BTT just gives a remedial selection where the user can select which hotkey/action the user wants to trigger (based on the titles the user gave them in BTT). For some users, I suspect they're happy to have this sort of a "true" conflict and to rely on the dialog to select the appropriate action each time. For me, however, it's just helpful to realize when I've screwed up and need to go back and reassign a different key combination. Or, on the rare occasion where I do want both using the same key combination in the same app, then I create menu in Alfred to tie them to (i.e., so I don't have to use BTT's ugly dialog). I'm sure there are better ways - like internally checking and providing feedback to the user as they're setting the key combination in Alfred, etc. - but BTT's approach works pretty well, too.

[GuiB]

Hey, a little late, but wanted to join the party since this is one of my most wanted feature requests (I think we talked about this multiple time ago...)! Actually, it would be great to remove the restriction completely and allow to assign the same hotkey in any workflow and make a popup to list the possible list of actions when invoking a hotkey which is assigned to multiple actions (like @Jasondm007 is mentioning), but being able to use the same hotkey only in app-specific situation would be a great step!

 

I've been assigning some of my hotkeys from behind (by editing the workflow "info.plist") or using BetterTouchTool or Hammerspoon to get around this.

 

On 1/17/2020 at 6:22 AM, Andrew said:

I'm open to implementing this.

 

One of the reasons this hasn't been a thing so far is it is much easier for users to accidentally get themselves into a confusing situation. What would you consider to be the desired behaviour if there were a hotkey conflict? (e.g. set same hotkey on two different synced macs in different workflows, which when the sync merges, they are both "valid").

 

I think the idea to pop a list of the actions that are linked to the invoked hotkey would make it work and would clearly show that we have a conflict, but the wanted action could still be invoked from the popup list. Maybe to make it even clearer, you could add a little mention on the popup that specifies that multiple actions were found using the invoked hotkey...

 

For the popup, what I'm thinking is to just pop the normal Alfred search UI, but with the list items set to the conflicted actions (so we can invoke one using CMD+1 or CMD+2 ... or writing its title to filter the list). The problem I'm thinking is how can we get a title, but the Hotkey object doesn't have one... maybe you could use the Workflow Title and with that, maybe you could add a "Label" field to the Hotkey object or use an Object Note as title? With that you could set the item icon to the Workflow icon or add an icon field to the Hotkey object... Maybe those new fields could be grouped and mention that they would be used in case of hotkey conflict.

 

I know this may be quite some work to implement the feature, but I think this would be worth it and I think it would actually make it less confusing to every user (new and more experimented ones; I think there were multiple messages here on the forum regarding the confusion of a user regarding why it couldn't use a specific key combination and then later found out it was already used somewhere else). Also, this could be used to implement some kind of modal keybinding.

 

To give some more idea... To make it easier to fix those conflicted hotkeys, when on this popup you could set a modifier key that would jump to the selected hotkey object node in its workflow. This way we won't have to search too much to find where it was set.

 

So again, just my +1

 

 

[Andrew]

Just as a little sneak... native support for assigning the same hotkey to multiple Hotkey Triggers throughout the same and different workflows is coming to Alfred 4.1

[GuiB]

1 hour ago, Andrew said:

Just as a little sneak... native support for assigning the same hotkey to multiple Hotkey Triggers throughout the same and different workflows is coming to Alfred 4.1

Great! Thanks Andrew! :)

[Jasondm007]

Thanks @Andrew!!