"Eject" commands missing

[Chris Messina]

This seems like a new issue since I've setup my new M1 MacBook Pro, but even though I have the "eject" and "ejectall" System commands enabled, they don't appear in my Alfred results.

 

Any reason why this would be? (And yes, I had several external volumes mounted when I tried to execute this command)

 

[deanishe]

2 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

they don't appear in my Alfred results.

 

An image of /Volumes would have been more useful than of your fallback searches…

 

2 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

Any reason why this would be?

 

The obvious candidates would be Alfred lacking permission to enumerate /Volumes or the part of the OS responsible for that going tits-up. I assume you've already quit and restarted Alfred.

 

Have you checked permissions? Does browsing /Volumes in Alfred work? Are Finder and Disk Utility enumerating your volumes correctly? If you've got a third-party file manager, like ForkLift or Path Finder, can you eject volumes from them?

[Chris Messina]

10 minutes ago, deanishe said:

An image of /Volumes would have been more useful than of your fallback searches…

 

Here you go. As you can see, Alfred has access to and can see my Volumes.

Similarly, Disk Utility can see all of my volumes too:

 

 

 

I do no have any third party Finder extensions installed. 

 

The Eject command worked on my Intel MacBook Pro; it doesn't seem to work on my M1 MacBook Pro. I do/have synced my Alfred settings between both using Dropbox. 

 

[deanishe]

4 minutes ago, Chris Messina said:

I do no have any third party Finder extensions installed.

 

Not Finder extensions, third-party file managers. Something like ForkLift. An application that would be using the same APIs as Alfred, basically.

 

Could you post the output of ls /Volumes?

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by deanishe

[Chris Messina]

8 minutes ago, deanishe said:

Not Finder extensions, third-party file managers. Something like ForkLift. An application that would be using the same APIs as Alfred, basically.

 

Afraid not. This is a clean install of macOS... I've been re-installing my apps one at a time, and haven't installed anything like that (that I know of). 

 

Here's the output of that command:

 

[deanishe]

Oops. You have it set to "Removable Media". That doesn't include disks. You want one of the other options.

 

Should have spotted that earlier. Sorry.

[Chris Messina]

31 minutes ago, deanishe said:

You have it set to "Removable Media". That doesn't include disks. You want one of the other options.

 

🤦🏻‍♂️

 

Yep, that did it. Good catch! Thanks!

 

 

Now I see:

It does occur to me that @Andrew may want to update the exclusion list to include `*.backup`, since com.apple.TimeMachine* doesn't exclude Time Machine backups.

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by Chris Messina
added exclusion tip

[deanishe]

30 minutes ago, Chris Messina said:

It does occur to me that @Andrew may want to update the exclusion list to include `*.backup`

 

That came up the other day, but I didn’t realise it was standard now. Yeah, it probably wants updating. I wonder if .timemachine* might not be a better choice. *.backup might catch some other things.

 

[Chris Messina]

1 hour ago, deanishe said:

I wonder if .timemachine* might not be a better choice. *.backup might catch some other things.

 

Possibly, but .timemachine* doesn't actually exclude all those dated .backup files in my screenshot, which should be the intention (since those are Time Machine backups!). 

[deanishe]

8 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

but .timemachine* doesn't actually exclude all those dated .backup

 

I guess the globs are only matched against volume names then, not paths.

[Neilio]

@Chris Messina Thanks for posting this – I thought I was losing it a little when I couldn't get the eject command to appear. This seems like a small UX issue where the eject command is the only contextual System option – the Eject command should still show up in the results but there should be a "No [type of thing] connected" or something like that. Anyway, glad to know it was a simple fix.

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, Neilio said:

but there should be a "No [type of thing] connected" or something like that.

 

Fundamentally, Alfred doesn’t work that way. If a command/search/workflow returns no results, Alfred always shows its fallback searches instead.

 

A lot of workflows deliberately show a "nothing found" result, but built-in Alfred features do not, so for better or worse, I don't see Eject being changed to work differently to everything else.

[Andrew]

I'm likely going to be moving to a different macOS framework for discovering and presenting ejectable drives in the future, however, I do agree that these backup volumes shouldn't be shown for now.

 

Alfred uses NSString isLike: for this comparison, which allows NSPredicate style formatting (cut down REGEX). I could limit this catching the wrong items by using something a bit janky like this in the default ignore list:

 

[0-9]*-[0-9]*-[0-9]*-*.backup

 

[Andrew]

This is now in 4.6.2 b1276 pre-release. You may need to reset the eject exclusion list if you've already edited it.