Alfred missing? [Resolved]

[macrospect]

Over the past two weeks, Alfred often is just "missing": when I hit my hotkey to open Alfred, or use any other hotkey that triggers an Alfred workflow, nothing happens. I have to go to my Applications folder and click on it before all of my workflows work. This has never happened before; Alfred is always very reliable. Any ideas about what could be causing this, and how to fix it?

 

(Additional details: This is happening on two different macs, with synced Alfred preferences, each of which is running a different version of MacOS. It often happens when I first wake up the computers from sleep/screensaver in the morning, but I believe it's occasionally happened at other times during the day, too. Alfred is set to open at login, and anyway I don't fully turn my computers off often.)

[Stephen_C]

Do please tell us:

• exactly what versions of Alfred and macOS you are running;
• how you sync your Alfred preferences;
• what changed on your system(s) just before the problem occurred (e.g., a macOS update).

13 minutes ago, macrospect said:

anyway I don't fully turn my computers off often

Well you might try rebooting both to see if that makes a difference. My view is that regular reboots are desirable.

 

Stephen

[macrospect]

Thank you for the reply! 

• I am on Alfred 5 on both work and home computers, the latest version. At work, I'm on MacOS Sonoma, latest version. At home, I'm on Ventura but I'm not sure exactly which version (can check later if relevant). 
• I sync Alfred preferences using iCloud. 
• I unfortunately can't think of anything that changed immediately prior to the problem starting. I did upgrade to Sonoma at work about a month or a little more ago, but I am fairly certain the Alfred trouble started at least two weeks later. I did start using Hazel about a month ago, and have introduced some new rules over the past couple of weeks, but none of these apply to the Alfred preferences folder. I also started using Ulysses for writing maybe around the same time (possibly a bit before), but I can't think of how that would be related. 

I have rebooted since this happened the first time, but I will try again and if it helps, I'll update here.

 

[Stephen_C]

1 hour ago, macrospect said:

I sync Alfred preferences using iCloud. 

Have you made sure your preferences are made available offline?

 

Stephen

[Stephen_C]

1 hour ago, macrospect said:

I am on Alfred 5 on both work and home computers, the latest version.

To be quite clear, the latest version is Alfred 5.5. beta 2. Do you mean that or Alfred 5.1.4 which was the prior release version?

 

(It's always better to be specific about version numbers rather than simply refer to "the latest version” because, in cases like this it's important and can lead to confusion.)

 

Stephen

[macrospect]

Makes sense. I'm using Alfred 5.1.4, and, yes, I have made my preferences available offline (I do not optimize Mac storage). On this Mac, I'm on Sonoma 14.3.

 

A new observation: I think this happens whenever my computer goes to sleep. It does not seem to happen in between sleeps. 

Edited March 9 by macrospect

[Vero]

15 hours ago, macrospect said:

Alfred often is just "missing": when I hit my hotkey to open Alfred

 

@macrospect Could you please elaborate on that? Is the Alfred bowler hat still present in the menu bar? Can you show Alfred's search by choosing "Toggle Alfred" from that menu bar icon?

 

I'd like to understand if it's a scenario where 1. Alfred quits or becomes unresponsive or 2. Alfred is still there and working but your preferences have been moved or removed so Alfred may not be responding to the hotkeys you expect.

 

If it's the latter, try temporarily creating a new folder directly into your user directory (i.e. /Users/yourusername/Alfred/ - not inside Documents or Desktop, as these can also be synced by iCloud) and set your preferences to be "synced" to this location. This will unsync your preferences on that Mac, and will give a stable location for your preferences. Try setting your computer to sleep and waking, etc to see if the behaviour returns to normal. This will help narrow down the issue to a syncing one.

 

Cheers,
Vero

[macrospect]

Thank you. I had hidden the menu bar icon, so I'm not sure. I have now added it, but this problem hasn't happened at all for the past 24 hours (not sure why). I can report next time it happens, whether the menu bar icon is present. And then yes, assuming it happens again and it's #1, I'll try to change the sync location to see if that makes a difference. 

[macrospect]

So the problem completely stopped for three days, and now it just came back. This time, I had the icon in the menu bar set, and it turned out that it disappeared when Alfred went missing (so option #1 that @Vero had mentioned). Any suggestions for what I might do? I should also add that my earlier observation that the issue only happens when the computer goes into sleep mode may, this time, have been disproven. I'm fairly (though not 100%) certain that I had used Alfred in between the last sleep and the disappearance of Alfred. 

[Vero]

@macrospect This sounds very unusual, so will need a little more investigating on your part.

 

If you say Alfred "goes missing" and is no longer in the menu bar, could you open Console and see whether there are any crash logs? If so, please email those and your Diagnostics to our info@ address so that I can take a deeper look. You can get your Diagnostics file by typing "?diagnostics" into Alfred.

 

If there are no crash logs, check the Activity Monitor app and see if Alfred is still in the list of running apps.

[macrospect]

So it just happened again. Again, Alfred's hat was missing from the menu bar. I checked the Console, but no crash reports for today (and none in the past indicating Alfred). I also checked the Activity Monitor, and Alfred did not appear in the list of running apps (just to be sure, I checked for the "process name" under CPU/Memory/Disk and for "app name" under Energy, but Alfred was nowhere. He really does appear to have disappeared....  

 

I do believe, though, that this time it may have happened again right after my computer had been asleep (though I can't be 100% sure). 

 

If there's anything else that I should check, please let me know. This does seem like a slow process, though, because it is now happening less frequently (about every other day). 

[Vero]

@macrospect If there's no crash log, Alfred isn't crashing so there's *something else* causing it to quit.

 

Could you please check whether you're using:

• Any third-party apps that claim to make your Mac more efficient by managing other apps (e.g. quitting them) when it believes the app is idle?
• Any Alfred workflow you might have installed or created that could be scripted to quit or restart Alfred in any way?
• Have experienced unexpected quitting behaviour from any other apps, app helpers in the menu bar, etc?

The more information you can provide on your specific Mac configuration, the more likely we'll be able to help you. 

 

Could you also please provide your Diagnostics file, which you can get by typing "?diagnostics" into Alfred? You can then email it to our info@ address with a reference back to this thread.

[macrospect]

Ah. I realized that I have an Alfred Focus workflow that I edited a few weeks ago that quits apps I'm not using in current projects. I tried to exempt background-running apps, but I just checked and somehow I forgot Alfred when I edited it this time. I assume this is the solution, but I will check back if the problem recurs. So sorry to take up your time! But I am very grateful for your pointing me toward the solution....