Homebrew installed apps and linked apps

[rkrug]

Hi

 

First of all: Alfred is great. It makes life so much easier.

 

I would like to resurrect a question about symlinks: How can I make Alfred 2 find links to applications in the `/Applications folder? The Folder itself is added to the Search Scope, and applications in it are found.

 

Also, if I install applications via brew cask install ... they are found as well.

 

But there are a few homebrew programs (R, R-gui, ...) which can not be installed via brew cask but which have .app folder. These can be linked to the /Applications or ~/Applications folder. Now to add all apps separately would be not feasible, so I figured out that adding /usr/local/Cellar  to the Search Scope makes Alfred 2 find the apps - but this is problematic, as different versions can exist which probably do not work properly.

 

So the best solution would be if Alfred 2 could identify these symlinkes pointing to apps and to show these in the search results. Is this possible?

 

Thanks,

 

Rainer

[Andrew]

Hi

 

First of all: Alfred is great. It makes life so much easier.

 

I would like to resurrect a question about symlinks: How can I make Alfred 2 find links to applications in the `/Applications folder? The Folder itself is added to the Search Scope, and applications in it are found.

 

Also, if I install applications via brew cask install ... they are found as well.

 

But there are a few homebrew programs (R, R-gui, ...) which can not be installed via brew cask but which have .app folder. These can be linked to the /Applications or ~/Applications folder. Now to add all apps separately would be not feasible, so I figured out that adding /usr/local/Cellar  to the Search Scope makes Alfred 2 find the apps - but this is problematic, as different versions can exist which probably do not work properly.

 

So the best solution would be if Alfred 2 could identify these symlinkes pointing to apps and to show these in the search results. Is this possible?

 

Thanks,

 

Rainer

 

The issue is that symlinks aren't very well indexed by OS X and manually tracing symlinks can lead to performance issues and recursive link issues. I already have a ticket to consider pre-indexing certain folders such as [~]/Applications to manually work around these Spotlight issues, but for now, the only real option is to add the cellar folder to Alfred.

 

Another option is if you have the Powerpack, to create a single workflow with keywords linking to the symlink / original. This would mean they are always listed in the results regardless of location.

[espinielli]

I have this issue as well. (Alfred v3.6.1 [910])

For example I have

    lrwxr-xr-x   1 mee  admin   30 Mar 18 13:38 Emacs.app -> /usr/local/opt/emacs/Emacs.app

which is not found by Alfred

[deanishe]

16 minutes ago, espinielli said:

I have this issue as well

 

Did you add /usr/local/opt to Alfred's scope, like Andrew suggested?