tmonney Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 Hi, First of all, thanks for this great tool! I noticed that Alfred does not take the kMDItemAlternateNames attribute into account when indexing/searching. The basic use case is described at https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/issues/2847. Basically, homebrew-cask now allows to change the target symlink it creates in ~/Applications. This is useful when several applications have the same final name (for example, multiple Eclipse IDE variations end up in ~/Applications/Eclipse.app. Using target renaming, one can have ~/Applications/Eclipse.app and ~/Applications/Scala IDE.app, pointing to /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/eclipse-ide/4.3.1/eclipse/Eclipse.app, resp. /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/scala-ide/3.0.2/eclipse/Eclipse.app. The problem now is that one cannot search 'Scala IDE', since neither Alfred nor Spotlight index symlinks. A solution is to add extended attributes to the application bundle. Concretely, running the following: $ xattr -w com.apple.metadata:kMDItemAlternateNames '("Scala IDE")' /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/scala-ide/3.0.2/eclipse/Eclipse.app allows Spotlight to find the application with the 'Scala IDE' query. Alfred does not index it though. It would be nice to index the kMDItemAlternateNames attribute use it as the displayed label in the Alfred search box when a match is found on this attribute Thoughts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew Posted February 13, 2014 Share Posted February 13, 2014 Hi, First of all, thanks for this great tool! I noticed that Alfred does not take the kMDItemAlternateNames attribute into account when indexing/searching. The basic use case is described at https://github.com/phinze/homebrew-cask/issues/2847. Basically, homebrew-cask now allows to change the target symlink it creates in ~/Applications. This is useful when several applications have the same final name (for example, multiple Eclipse IDE variations end up in ~/Applications/Eclipse.app. Using target renaming, one can have ~/Applications/Eclipse.app and ~/Applications/Scala IDE.app, pointing to /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/eclipse-ide/4.3.1/eclipse/Eclipse.app, resp. /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/scala-ide/3.0.2/eclipse/Eclipse.app. The problem now is that one cannot search 'Scala IDE', since neither Alfred nor Spotlight index symlinks. A solution is to add extended attributes to the application bundle. Concretely, running the following: $ xattr -w com.apple.metadata:kMDItemAlternateNames '("Scala IDE")' /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/scala-ide/3.0.2/eclipse/Eclipse.app allows Spotlight to find the application with the 'Scala IDE' query. Alfred does not index it though. It would be nice to index the kMDItemAlternateNames attribute use it as the displayed label in the Alfred search box when a match is found on this attribute Thoughts? Alfred does take into account alternative names, but not in his app cache. I've actually fixed this already for the upcoming Alfred 2.2 release though, as it also addresses a localisation issue. If you prefix a search with [spacebar], it bypasses the app cache, so you'll likely see eclipse when typing: [spacebar]scala Cheers, Andrew Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tmonney Posted February 14, 2014 Author Share Posted February 14, 2014 Hi Andrew, That is great news. The [spacebar] does the trick, thanks. Looking forward to the 2.2 release. Regards, Thierry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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