Is there a way can fuzzy search the existing workflow in your alfred by name or keyword.

[SummerChill]

hi everyone:

Alfred supports precise search by keyword, but I have a lot of workflows, and sometimes I will forget the keyword of my workflow. I want to be able to fuzzy search for alfred workflows by name and keywords. Just like searching for snippet use "viewer hotkey".

 

Now I have to "alfred preferences => workflow => filter text box"  the process is  little bit of trouble....

 

Is there a way can fuzzy search the existing workflow in Alfred by name or keyword  through viewer hotkey ?

Edited November 14, 2021 by SummerChill

[vitor]

Moving this to feature requests. There may be a performance reason why ? and Search Preferences don’t work like that.

[giovanni]

@SummerChill not exactly what you are looking for, but this thread with a similar request and (useful) workflow might be relevant

 

[SummerChill]

@giovanni not exactly what I am looking for, but the post also help me a lot. Thanks!

[deanishe]

On 11/16/2021 at 6:53 PM, vitor said:

There may be a performance reason why ? and Search Preferences don’t work like that.

I suspect it's so large collections of snippets don't overwhelm other results.

 

In terms of performance, I'm sure Alfred could easily handle full fuzzy search on many tens of thousands of items.

 

20K is no problem with my Go library, and that's doing much more work than Alfred's matching algos.

[vitor]

Just did a few more tests and the Workflow’s Filter box doesn’t fuzzy search either, it’s just so good at focusing on what you want (or what I’m testing) that it seems like it. It will filter as you type, but if it stops finding matches you will still be on the last one it found, which is different from using ? (and it makes sense).

 

This might make more sense as a Workflow than a feature request.

[deanishe]

6 hours ago, vitor said:

This might make more sense as a Workflow than a feature request.

 

I think this is a poor fit for a workflow, tbh. It’s a hell of a job trying to decipher all the info.plists in your prefs bundle (work out all the Hotkey modifiers etc.) and impossible to navigate Alfred Preferences from a workflow the way ? does.

 

Depends how you look at it, I suppose. As a tool for navigating rapidly to a workflow in Alfred Preferences, ? would benefit from the kind of fuzzy matching Alfred supports for applications in its main search. If it's supposed to be a source of information for help purposes, it would be better served with more and better metadata than looser matching, imo.

 

For example, I tried to find the Hotkey I’d set up to open the current selection in Dropover yesterday. I ended up grepping my prefs bundle because Open URL/File are completely opaque to ? and the only element-specific search terms Alfred recognises for a Hotkey Trigger are “hotkey” and “trigger”.

 

Why can't I find Hotkeys (or Open URL/File) elements based on the applications they're assigned to? Or their notes, seeing as they can't have any other unique text?

 

My personal preference would be to put snippets behind a separate keyword (e.g. ?snip), so they don’t overwhelm other results, and to use much richer metadata for searching. SQLite fulltext search seems a natural fit. Then you can bung absolutely everything in there (notes, workflow descriptions etc.) as long as you assign appropriately low priority.

[bongobong]

On 11/18/2021 at 7:25 AM, deanishe said:

My personal preference would be to put snippets behind a separate keyword (e.g. ?snip), so they don’t overwhelm other results, and to use much richer metadata for searching. SQLite fulltext search seems a natural fit. Then you can bung absolutely everything in there (notes, workflow descriptions etc.) as long as you assign appropriately low priority.

 

I don't suppose you could expand on how I might do this? I've looked up ?snip but can't really see how it helps me. Thank you. 

 

[yinan]

Hi! @Vero@vitor@Andrew, sorry to pin you, but I hope this feature deserve some attention since it is brought up here and by the discussion above a few years ago.

 

I am experiencing the same issue: Currently actions in the workflow can only be searched/triggered via keywords, but it is not human-friendly as keywords are usually acronyms or abbreviations (such as "amm" for about my mac workflow) instead of the actual English words that really mean something. 

 

On the other hand, the Placeholder Title of the action is usually describing what the action/workflow is for in plain English, therefore much more memorizable than keywords. And Actually that's more intuitive of how search and filter results works in Alfred, since the Title is the main text displaying, it should be searchable, just like the name of the Applications.

 

So would it be better if the workflows can also be searched via both the Placeholder Title and the keywords?

 

PS: I understand that ? keyword can display keywords from searching the name of the workflow or the configuration panels, but it cannot search the Placeholder Title either. Also, it is not straightforward as I have to do a query using ?, then memorize the keywords, finally escape the ? query and use the keywords.

[lycopodiopsida]

Hi,

I would also say that, in my opinion, the reliance on keywords is the least ergonomic feature in Alfred. There was a problem with the way Alfred acted (or rather the lack of actions) on content, such as text or files, but it was mostly solved with universal actions. But the lack of fast and reliable WF fuzzy search in Alfred stops me every time I decide to use it, since to be fast with it I have to remember several keywords per workflow or search for Workflows with ? or "alf" and life is too short for it - a launcher should be fast and smooth. The way it works now is maybe ok for users who use only 5 WFs overall, but for powerusers the way we trigger WFs is not optimal in my opinion.

 

Alfred went a long way with automatizations, WF editor, WF debugging (love this feature), snippets and universal actions, so I have some hopes that the way we interact with WFs will be addressed too...

Edited January 12 by lycopodiopsida