Typing Return has stopped opening folders

[Mark Lawrence]

As the topic title says, my most common Alfred use case, opening folders in the Finder by typing the name and hitting the Return key, has stopped working. I am using Alfred 5.5 on Sonoma with an M1 MacBook Air. This is not an indexing problem; Alfred finds the folders just fine, but it won't open them. It also won't open them if I use the "open" keyword. It will open the parent folder and select the folder I want to open if I use the "find" keyword.

 

Things I have tried that haven't worked:

• Restarting the Mac.
• Quitting and restarting Alfred.
• Toggling the "Use ↩ to open folders in Finder" checkbox off and then back on again.

 

I'm currently using "find" to get around this problem, but that's not how Alfred should work. Any ideas of what else I can do?

[Vero]

@Mark Lawrence Welcome to the forum

 

Could you provide a bit more details on this:

• What is the exact search scope of these folders? Are they local folders or within a sync service where they may be set to online-only?
• Does it happen to all folders or only specific ones?
• Are you using standard Finder or a third-party Finder replacement that may not be correctly opening the folders?
• Could you drag one of the folders to the File Troubleshooter and share the results in your reply?

This should get us started in working out what's happening on your Mac

 

Cheers,
Vero

[Mark Lawrence]

In the same way that scheduling a doctor's appointment makes your illness go away, signing up to the forum and asking a question—after a full day of not being able to open folders—has made Alfred go back to working the way it should. I started to answer @Vero's last question this morning and folders opened as expected. And I didn't even have to reboot!

 

By the way, the answers to the first three questions are:

• they were local folders on my MacBook Air,
• the problem was with every folder, and
• I use the standard Finder.

My suspicion is that something to do with iCloud Drive, which has also been giving me trouble recently, caused the Finder to hang and not respond to whatever directives Alfred was giving it. But now that things are back to normal, I guess I'll never know. Sorry to have wasted your time.

[Vero]

@Mark Lawrence No problem, happy to have sent good vibes to help out 🤣 

 

If it happens again, iCloud Drive is also my first guess as to the source of the issue, so just pop back in if there are ever issues and we'll see if we can share helpful insight!