solved Alfred popping up on his own? [Caused by Workflow, solution within]

[luckman212]

macOS 12.6 - I've been noticing that Alfred seems to pop up even when I didn't call on him lately. This started 2 or 3 beta builds ago, in the 20xx range.

 

The first 2 times this happened to me I brushed it off as a fluke or maybe I tapped Alfred's hotkey by mistake (I use F11)

 

However, it proceeded to keep happening at random times. All of a sudden, Alfred's search bar would just pop up there in front of whatever I was doing. 
 

In fact, when I woke up this morning, when I looked over at the computer, there it was again- having popped up in the middle of the night when nobody was at the keyboard.

 

I don't have a cat (before you ask if maybe he sat on my keyboard   )

 

I've been using Alfred for years, never had this sort of thing happen. I haven't changed hardware or software recently, other than updating to these latest betas of Alfred.

[Andrew]

@luckman212 have you installed something else on your Mac recently which could be causing this? Perhaps try changing your hotkey to something other than F11 in case there is a hardware issue with that key?

[luckman212]

@Andrew Not that I can think of. And, it's doing this on 2 separate Macs - 1 MacBook Air and 1 Mac Mini M1. I'll keep looking for clues, but just wanted to mention here in case others are having the same issue.

[luckman212]

Just adding another data point @Andrew

 

I updated to Build 2085 [RC1] today. And then went out for a few hours. 

When I came back and unlocked my Mac, I saw Alfred's window popped open (empty) on my screen.

 

I decided to play around a bit and made a screen recording. Not that it shows anything very revealing but at least you'll see what I am facing and know that I am not making it up 🙂

 

video:

https://gist.github.com/luckman212/99ea272429f13906c9cef0beb21771c1?permalink_comment_id=4324431#gistcomment-4324431

 

[Andrew]

@luckman212 I don't think you're making it up.

 

There are a number of things which can make the Alfred window show, and as this is specific to your Mac(s), we need to work out what it is.

 

My next suggestion would be a workflow which is calling back on itself, or calling Alfred. Alfred will show when you double click the icon (or "open" it from terminal). Could you look through your workflows and disable any workflows which you aren't using, or which have scripted call backs to Alfred (e.g. via a Run Script).

 

Also, check Launch Services for anything which could be calling Alfred (perhaps placed there by a workflow). @vitor has experience with Launch Services so may give better advice in this area.

 

 

[vitor]

27 minutes ago, Andrew said:

Launch Services

 

@luckman212 Look inside ~/Library/LaunchAgents. See anything there which you don’t recognise or could be the cause?

 

Do you have any Karabiner tricks (or from another app, like BetterTouchTool) which could be simulating the keyboard event? What system command is shared with your F11 (e.g. volume down)?

 

In Alfred Preferences → Appearance → Options → Focusing, what do you have?

[luckman212]

Thanks for the tips @Andrew and @vitor

I think it could be related to this workflow: https://github.com/blacs30/bitwarden-alfred-workflow

 

It has a background task (that I wrote) as a launchagent to keep bitwarden secrets synced. I think maybe somehow things are going off the rails once in a while and it's popping up Alfred's window (empty). I'll see if I can enable some debug logging in that agent to see if the timing correlates.

 

A for my Focusing option, I have it set to "Standard Mode" 🙂

 

[luckman212]

Good sleuthing guys! You were right, it's a background task that's causing this, part of the Bitwarden v2 workflow (as I suspected).

 

I filed a bugreport over on the GitHub.

 

Whew! Good to know this isn't some crazy edge case that only happens to me (which is usually the case)

 

[luckman212]

In case this is happening to anyone else who happens to be using that workflow, @blacs30 just released v2.4.6 which fixes this issue. Case closed!