Nickname apps? ("Calendar" opens Fantastical)

[nemosmith]

I'm hoping to use more natural language to open 3rd party apps via Alfred, for example:

Mail -> MailMate

Calendar -> Fantastical

Reminder -> Omnifocus

etc...

 

Does anybody know a easy and clean way to do this?

[vitor]

Welcome @nemosmith,

 

Tag of add Spotlight comments to your apps, and Alfred will find them by those keywords.

[raguay.customct]

Or, simply make a workflow with lots of keywords for the app you want to a launcher for the app. Very simple, straight forward, and easy to see and edit.

[vitor]

19 hours ago, raguay.customct said:

Or, simply make a workflow with lots of keywords for the app you want to a launcher for the app. Very simple, straight forward, and easy to see and edit.

 

But it also requires adding icons to each Keyword, and keeping the Workflow up-to-date as you remove apps from your system.

[nemosmith]

On 1/26/2020 at 8:50 PM, vitor said:

Welcome @nemosmith,

 

Tag of add Spotlight comments to your apps, and Alfred will find them by those keywords.

This seems to have worked- but strangely only partially.

 

For example, it works with Fantastical and Mailmate, but not with DayOne... which is straight-up bizarre... (same process for all the apps, spotlight re-indexed and application cache cleared)

 

Does anybody have any insight into this?

[nemosmith]

Found the fix:

Drag the app with the comment into Spotlight privacy and then remove it (i.e. https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/stop-spotlight-indexing/)

 

I assume this forces reindex which solves the problem. However, I had previously tried to reindex via Alfred advance pref and it didn't work. Perhaps the Adv. Pref. function is bugged?

[deanishe]

3 hours ago, nemosmith said:

Perhaps the Adv. Pref. function is bugged?

 

Unlikely. It simply tells the system metadata index to re-index your files. Problems are normally in the (far more complex) system index, not in Alfred. The re-indexing is very slow, however, so it's likely that it simply hadn't finished.

 

FWIW, you can tell the system to re-index specific files or directories with the shell command mdimport /path/to/the/thing, which is often a lot faster than dragging things in and out of the Privacy pane, and far, far faster than rebuilding the whole index.