Shortcut for activating Alfred + snippets to support : for emojis

[Steve Ball]

I've followed the excellent suggestion in Joel's blog (joelcalifa.com/blog/alfred-emoji-snippet-pack) for making Alfred my emoji picker.

 

It's awesome but it could be awesomer.

 

To chose an emoji, I have to:

 

• Type ⌘-Space to activate Alfred
• S followed by space to select snippets (I've made "s" my shortcut for snippets)
• then type the name of the emoji I want

 

What I would really like is something like pressing ":" to do the first of those two steps. Then I could type :rocket to get a 🚀.

 

The emoji dropdown chooser (with Joel's Alfred emoji pack) is excellent. I would just like one keypress instead of three to get to it.

[Steve Ball]

You would also need a list box of the apps and websites that you wouldn't want this expansion to apply in. There's an excellent Mac app called Rocket that's an emoji picker that works this way. Unfortunately it's broken for M1 Macs.

 

With Rocket you just type :sli (for example) to get a dropdown with the :slightly_smiling and :slightly_frowning options. You can choose which apps (like Terminal) and which sites (slack.com) you don't want this behaviour in.

 

It's got the interface exactly perfectly right. I'm just a bit bummed that it's broken on the latest Macs. If Alfred could provide this shortcut then I'd get that high-speed emoji inside of Alfred (which I love 😍)

[vitor]

Make a Workflow. Connect a Snippet Trigger to a Show Alfred utility with Argument s (note the space at the end) and you’re done.

For the second part of the request—which apps to exclude—you have two options:

The simplest is to define them in the Snippets feature itself (click “Auto Expansion Options”).

The other is to make it specific to your trigger in the Workflow. The Snippet Trigger has a Focused App Variable checkbox you can tick which will tell the Workflow which app you were in at the time. By combining that with a Conditional Utility, you can control which apps it triggers on or doesn’t. To get the bundle ID of the apps you care about, after ticking the box connect a Debugger Utility to the Snippet Trigger; from then on, the debugger will show which app you were on at the time you triggered the snippet.

[Chris Messina]

16 hours ago, Steve Ball said:

You would also need a list box of the apps and websites that you wouldn't want this expansion to apply in. There's an excellent Mac app called Rocket that's an emoji picker that works this way. Unfortunately it's broken for M1 Macs.

 

I'm afraid I can't be helpful with your original question, but as an M1 owner that also uses Rocket, I'm curious what's broken about it? Are you on Rocket 1.9?