Unified Universal Action hotkey

[JesusTheHun]

I'm feeling overwhelmed by hotkeys. Everywhere.

I just saw Buzz as a brain flash.

One of the reason I like Alfred is that I have one hotkey, and from there I can trigger anything.

For Universal Action, I would like to keep the same hotkey, but when I try to set it, the Alfred prompt show up, of course.

 

So maybe this thread should be in "Features request", but the implementation could be either :

 

When I toggle Alfred, if any file is selected, offer the Universal Action menu directly, just like if I pressed the UA hotkey (yes I'm moving to an acronym now).

When I toggle Alfred, if any file is selected, open the classic prompt with an option "File(s) actions" that leads to the UA menu.

 

Maybe create an option to pick either behavior 🤷‍♂️

 

What do you think ?

[vitor]

That is not technically feasible (kind of, I’ll explain). There is no universal way to get the selection in every macOS app, so Alfred needs to simulate ⌘C to get a selection. That works pretty well, but macOS produces a sound when you try to copy when nothing is selected. To see what I mean, make sure you have nothing selected and press ⌘C.

So to save one shortcut, you’d need to be hearing that about half the time. If that doesn’t bother you, it can be done with a pretty simple Workflow.

 

[JesusTheHun]

I ended up creating a workflow to trigger Action in Alfred with a Keyword.

 

For anyone trying to achieve the same thing, this is what I did :

 

 

I create a Trigger Keyword.

Then I add Actions > Run Script (source), Language AppleScript :

set my text item delimiters to tab
tell application "Finder" to set theSelection to selection as alias list
repeat with i from 1 to count of theSelection
    set item i of theSelection to POSIX path of item i of theSelection as string
end repeat
return theSelection as text

 

 

Then I use Utilities > Split Arg :

 

 

Then I add Action in Alfred without touching anything.

 

 

[vitor]

You don’t need the Run Script, there is a Files and Folders → Get Selection in Finder Automation Task for it.