Universal Actions Contextual Menu

[Martin Packer]

I just got into Universal Actions.

 

For me as a PopClip user the key advantage is Alfred's not caring HOW the selection got made.

 

There is one thing I like about PopClip and that is the rather compact context menu it has. Alfred doesn't have such a thing.

 

What I'd love to see is a context menu with a "More" button at the end of it. This context menu has a few (selected by the user) actions to invoke.

 

Thoughts?

[vitor]

Not everyone is familiar with PopClip. It helps if you explain exactly how it’s feature works, with screenshots.

[Martin Packer]

OK. Here is an example. I had to grab it using a phone - as the effect I wanted to show disappears on taking a screen shot.

So the idea of PopClip is you select text and up pops this nice little menu. I haven't customised it much on this machine but you can see the Yoink add on to the right.

What I'd love to see is something similar with Alfred - for select frequently-used actions. We'd need one marked "More" or similar, of course, to bring up the current dialog.

[vitor]

Can’t say I agree that would make sense for Alfred. It’s a whole different paradigm and PopClip’s whole point. By design Alfred runs when it’s called and is otherwise invisible; adding a whole new automatic context seems neither simple nor consistent. You request would (literally) entail rewriting PopClip itself into Alfred.

 

It would make more sense to have PopClip invoke Alfred Workflows, which you probably can do via AppleScript.

[deanishe]

16 hours ago, vitor said:

It would make more sense to have PopClip invoke Alfred Workflows, which you probably can do via AppleScript.

 

There's already a Popclip extension for Alfred. Wouldn't take much editing to make it work with Universal Actions.

[leoofborg]

The PopClip action uses Applescript to do this:

 

tell application id "com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred" to search "{popclip text}"

 

Yes this is from the Alfred Popclip source, located here:

 

https://github.com/pilotmoon/PopClip-Extensions/tree/master/source/Alfred.popclipext

 

So is there a way to do something like this?

 

tell application id "com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred" to execute Universal Action on "{popclip text}"

 

That would pop up the Universal Actions UI instead of the search bar and make Alfred *really* useful. I looked in the AppleScript scripting dictionary but couldn't find anything obvious other than the search command.

Edited October 15, 2021 by leoofborg
adding sources

[vitor]

A Universal Action is a trigger. You don’t execute triggers, they are what executes other things. What you’re looking for is to connect to External Triggers.

Edited October 15, 2021 by vitor

[deanishe]

2 hours ago, leoofborg said:

I looked in the AppleScript scripting dictionary but couldn't find anything obvious other than the search command.

 

You can't have looked too closely: what you're after is directly under the description of the search command.

 

tell application id "com.runningwithcrayons.Alfred" to  action "/some/path/or/text/here"

 

Edited October 16, 2021 by deanishe