Heads-up Display

[zeitlings]

Heads-up Display

This is a demo for displaying notifications on a heads-up display in Alfred.

I wrote it as part of µBib, but I figured it might be interesting as a standalone.

The script takes two arguments:

• The text to display
• The width of the prompt

 

You can find it here on Github.

 

 

 

[yinan]

That's cool, Thanks for making this! I think it is very useful for running your workflows in Do Not Disturb mode when all notifications are muted.

[andy4222]

@zeitlingsthanks for building this as a standalone. Is there a way to speeden it up? It takes a good 3-4 seconds before the display HUD display shows up

[zeitlings]

@andy4222 sure, a compiled version would be faster or, better yet, a background process that doesn't deinitialize everything each time the hud is called

[andy4222]

Can I lookup the instructions somewhere to make a compiled version of it?

[zeitlings]

@andy4222 The recommended way is to use SPM (Swift Package Manager). However, I quickly tested a minimal-effort approach that works. You can compile the script as is without changing anything about the code. 

 

Navigate to HUD.swift with your terminal (or open the Workflow in Alfred, double-click any of the two objects, then click the little folder icon in the bottom left corner to open the location, select HUD.swift and send it to Alfred’s Universal Action (opt+cmd+#). From the options, choose “Open Terminal Here”.

 

In the terminal that opens paste and run this to create the executable at the same location.

swiftc -O HUD.swift

 

In the workflow, open the "Run Script" object and replace 

./HUD.swift "$1" 250

 

with

./HUD "$1" 250

 

Voilà.

[zeitlings]

Or better yet, just replace the contents of the "Run Script" object with this:

 

[[ -f ./HUD ]] || eval $(swiftc -O ./HUD.swift)
./HUD "$1" 250

 

If the executable does not exist yet, it will be created and then called.