Keyword ---> Keyword as an Action

[sudopeople]

I'd like to type a keyword and have a different Alfred keyword get executed. You can think of this as an alias or a shortcut.

 

A practical example is with Victor Quinn's Volume Adjust workflow: I type "vol mute" dozens of times per day. I'd rather type "mute" into Alfred.

 

I've been unable to find anything that accomplishes this literally or even really in practice. One of the stickies here talks about doing 'tell application "Alfred 2" to search "keyword args"' but that just presents an Alfred window and requires an enter press...or a keypress event to be fired which is A hard to get working correctly and B a horrible kludge.

 

For now I've added the mute keyword and altered the AppleScript to mute the volume when there's no argument...but that means I can't set up another "alias" like "half" for "vol 50" (since Alfred doesn't pass the keyword to scripts).

 

Obviously I could copy/paste the entire workflow (or AppleScript) for each "alias" but as a programmer I'm morally against that kind of thing.

 

Any other ideas?

Edited February 3, 2014 by sudopeople

[Vero]

I'd like to type a keyword and have a different Alfred keyword get executed. You can think of this as an alias or a shortcut.

 

A practical example is with Victor Quinn's Volume Adjust workflow: I type "vol mute" dozens of times per day. I'd rather type "mute" into Alfred.

 

Create a new workflow and have a look at the objects in the + in the top right. You can connect a keyword to an iTunes action to do exactly what you want (if I've understood you correctly)

 

 

All I've done here is pick a keyword object (with no argument) and set the keyword as "up" and "down". I then connected each one with its respective action from the + button in the top right (Actions > iTunes Command and then select from the dropdown menu)

 

Let me know if you'd like me to share the workflow above, but it'll only take a few seconds to create your own and you can set your own keywords as you go.

[Tyler Eich]

Vero's suggestion is the most elegant if you want to control iTunes.

 

If you want to control the system volume, try my fork of @victorquinn's workflow. It uses a 'mute' keyword connected to the relevant code in the original AppleScript.

 

I don't know of any general purpose way to do this. Each workflow is different, and there are several ways to process arguments.

[sudopeople]

Yeah, both are great ways for this specific example. I've got a few others I've had in mind and have been too lazy to implement  Still holding out for a Keyword to execute keywords!

Edited February 3, 2014 by sudopeople

[vitor]

There’s no option in Alfred to perform that action (you should add it as a feature suggestion). However, there is a way to accomplish what you want. It’s a hack, and it’s definitely not pretty, but it works. Expanding on the idea of telling Alfred to search for something, what you can do is

tell application "Alfred 2" to search "vol mute"
tell application "System Events" to key code 36

That will call Alfred’s window with your desired query, and the system will then take care of pressing ↩, which will effectively run the command. You’ll see Alfred’s window flash for a split second, and it is prone to possible undesired consequences (let’s say a dialog box pops in front, in that exact fraction of time — ↩ will not discriminate what app is in front), but it should work for the most part.