Sharing some useful simple Universal Action

[pseudometa]

Found the time to try out the new 4.5 release and I love it!

 

Other than a few mentionings in the Thread on the 4.5 beta, I haven't found many showcases of the new Universal Actions feature in this forum. Maybe we could share some usecases? Here is a workflow with a bunch of (mostly simple) Universal Actions:

 

Text Actions
- Titlecase
- Lowercase
- Uppercase
- Poor Text (removes formatting)
- Transform Spaces to Tabs
- Append to Clipboard (similar to Alfred's built-in function, but with manual hotkey and with universal action)
- Calculate the sum of all numbers in the selected text. Negative numbers are supported, as are both "," or "." as decimal separators. (Thousand separators are not supported though, as they would create ambiguous cases.)
- Run Brett Terpstra's SearchLink, which fetches the URL and creates a markdown link of the selected text.

 

URL Actions
- URL Encode
- URL Decode
- Create compact markdown link
- Create compact markdown link of all URLs in selecting (actually a Text Action...)
- SearchTitle: Fetch the title of the URL and create a Markdown link (basically the opposite of SearchLink)

 

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16Fnkj8wXxxNYlLTcEO-m8YHOobADLZE9/view?usp=sharing

 

 

[Chris Messina]

Love this!

 

I've been talking to the developer of TextBuddy to hook up his app to Universal Actions.. text modification scripts seems like an entire category that Alfred should embrace! 

[iApple]

5 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

Love this!

 

I've been talking to the developer of TextBuddy to hook up his app to Universal Actions.. text modification scripts seems like an entire category that Alfred should embrace! 

Great! Also a mega supporter of TB, hopefully Tyler can hook up to Alfred.

[tylerhall]

TextBuddy developer here 👋

 

Definitely looking into how to make all of TB's commands available through Alfred. I've been using Alfred myself since the pre-1.0 days, so getting TextBuddy connected would be a huge improvement for me as well.

[dfay]

Here are a couple of updated workflows of mine:

 

https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/2180-case-converter-including-title-case/

https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/4818-code-case/

[Chris Messina]

Thanks @dfay! Big fan of your Case Converter! I gently rearranged some of the blocks and added some synonyms in case you're interested (download):

 

[Chris Messina]

@Andrew seeing some unexpected behavior here:

1. I invoked my UA hotkey on an .mp4 and yet was able to access Case Converter UAs even though their type was set to only apply to Text.²
2. Only three UAs from @dfay's Workflow show up, even though five should appear.¹
3. All of the UA titles are the same, but I expect them to use the block's title (i.e. "Upper Case", "Lower Case", etc).

Am I missing something about how UAs work? 

 

¹

² 

[paulw]

@Chris Messina I think what's showing up are not the 5 different case change universal actions, but the placeholder title for the three keyword script filters ("cc", "change", "case") that you created in your edit of the workflow. I guess you're stuck with those unless script filters can exclude themselves as actions for specific file types (can they?)

Edited August 12, 2021 by paulw

[Chris Messina]

5 hours ago, paulw said:

what's showing up are not the 5 different case change universal actions, but the placeholder title for the three keyword script filters ("cc", "change", "case") that you created in your edit of the workflow

 

🤦🏻‍♂️ of course! You're totally right — I forgot that Script Filters have placeholder titles... and yes — it would be helpful if: 

• I could suppress Script Filters from appearing in Universal Actions or
• Set synonyms for keywords (which I've requested before)

[Andrew]

2 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

I could suppress Script Filters from appearing in Universal Actions or

 

This is in the works, much more granular control over what gets shown in universal actions, including per-workflow suppressing of keyword/script filter inclusion when universal action triggers have been implemented.

[deanishe]

34 minutes ago, Andrew said:

universal action triggers

 

The what now?

[Vero]

34 minutes ago, deanishe said:

The what now?

 

Universal Action Triggers, aka adding your own custom Actions  

[deanishe]

3 hours ago, Vero said:

 

Universal Action Triggers, aka adding your own custom Actions  

 

Right. I thought so. I completely misunderstood Andrew's post.

[Andrew]

On 8/12/2021 at 2:08 PM, deanishe said:

I completely misunderstood Andrew's post.

 

Not unsurprising, it reads back as a jumble of words

[spencer]

Hi @pseudometa — could you share an updated link to this workflow? Looks like the drive link expired and I'd like to implement some of these. Thanks!