Services and workflows

[lycopodiopsida]

Hello, 

 

I've done a test run with Launchbar 6, which I trashed after a couple of days because of huge memory usage and workflows ins Alfred. However, there is a feature, which I would like to see in Alfred... 

 

• Ability to copy an item or piece of text and to pass it to another application or service/workflow. How would I do it in alfred? Is there a placeholder for the most recent content of a clipboard and a way to use services on it?

Alfred seems to be very workflow-based, which is a good thing. But many of those workflows would be obsolete, if we could "chain" files/selections and perform actions on those with apps and services. 

[deanishe]

It depends what you mean by "pass it to another application".
 
You can get/set the contents of the clipboard with the pbcopy and pbpaste command-line utilities (or more directly in AppleScript), so it's fairly trivial to manipulate the clipboard from within a workflow.
 
Passing the text to applications is a lot tricker because anything much more complex than pasting it into the application needs to be done in an application-specific manner. 
 
It would be awesome if Alfred supported services. That's tricky to do from a workflow, as it'd have to be written using Cocoa.

[ctwise]

 

• Ability to copy an item or piece of text and to pass it to another application or service/workflow. How would I do it in alfred? Is there a placeholder for the most recent content of a clipboard and a way to use services on it?

 

 

You can get half-way there. The problem is that Alfred doesn't automatically trigger a copy when it is invoked and then restore the old pasteboard when it closes. Because of that, you don't have access to the app that had focus when Alfred was triggered and you can't copy text. Now that I've written that, I realize it should be a feature request.

 

There's a way around this but it requires using a hot-key. If you create a hot-key in a workflow, you can choose to pass-through 'Selection in OS/X'. Then the text you selected is copied to the pasteboard for use by the next step in a workflow. This is only half of what you're asking for, because the selection is only usable in that specific workflow. Take a look at the Funnel workflow (http://www.packal.org/workflow/funnel) to see a workflow that uses that feature to pump selected text through a user-configurable set of filters, e.g., lowercase, uppercase, remove blank lines, base64 encode/decode, etc.