how does Alfred start the screen saver?

[tjluoma]

I am experiencing a bug in Big Sur where this AppleScript…

 

tell application "System Events" to start current screen saver

 

…does nothing, even though it has long been the way to start the current screen saver from the command line or a shell script.

 

However, Alfred's "Start Screen Saver" feature by using the `screensaver` keyword DOES work, so it is clearly doing something else.

 

How can I incorporate Alfred's method of starting the screen saver into a script?

 

 

[tjluoma]

I've noticed that Alfred seems to have AppleScript support, but I can't figure out how to use that to tell Alfred to run the screensaver command.

[deanishe]

AFAIK, Alfred just launches ScreenSaverEngine.app.

 

On Catalina, it's in /System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSaverEngine.app.

[tjluoma]

Well, the other day when I tried launching ScreenSaverEngine, it did not work, but Alfred was still able to trigger it successfully.

 

Today ScreenSaverEngine.app is working, so it's harder to test that theory.