Alfred input panel disappears due to background Quit event.

[davidj]

For a while now, I've had Alfred's input window occasionally disappear when I was in the middle of typing something.  I finally got around to trying to figure out why.  Basically, I can do the following too quickly:

 

1.  Quit an app via cmd-Q

2.  Activate Alfred (in my case, via cmd-space)

3.  Begin typing something

 

If the Alfred panel opens before the background app quits, when that app does finish terminating, the Alfred panel will also close.  The biggest culprit, for me at least, is when I quit Apple's Mail app + Spamsieve.  That combination seems to do enough cleanup prior to closing that I can easily reproduce the behavior I'm talking about.

 

This "bug" is such a minor thing, except when I'm typing in Alfred and the panel suddenly disappears, continued typing is now sent to Finder.  This has occasionally resulted in me renaming files on my desktop, which is super annoying.

 

Anyway, I love Alfred and look forward to seeing it get even better.

 

~~~~~

Alfred v2.8.3 (435)

OS X 10.11.4

[FroZen_X]

I can kind of reproduce the behaviour when i start an app that takes longer to open and open Alfred then. When the App opened 

it pulls focus and Alfred closes.

This happens when Alfred is set to Compatibility Mode under -> Alfred Preferences -> Appearance -> Options -> Focusing

Change this to "Standard Mode" and check if you still have the problem.

[davidj]

Change this to "Standard Mode" and check if you still have the problem.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm already running in "Standard Mode".  

[Vero]

For a while now, I've had Alfred's input window occasionally disappear when I was in the middle of typing something.  I finally got around to trying to figure out why.  Basically, I can do the following too quickly:

 

 

 

By design, Alfred yields to other apps as, in the vast majority of cases, this is the appropriate behaviour. This is a corner case, where the focus is requested by an app that has taken a long time to launch or quit.

 

We have a ticket to investigate ways to deal with this gracefully, but at this point, your best bet would be to turn on "Show latest history if within 5 minutes" in Alfred's Advanced preferences, so that on the odd occasion where focus is stolen by one of those slow apps, you can simply pop Alfred back up and carry on where you were without having to re-type your query

 

I'll move this to closed, but know that we're keeping this in mind. 

 

Cheers,

Vero

[davidj]

We have a ticket to investigate ways to deal with this gracefully, but at this point, your best bet would be to turn on "Show latest history if within 5 minutes" in Alfred's Advanced preferences, so that on the odd occasion where focus is stolen by one of those slow apps, you can simply pop Alfred back up and carry on where you were without having to re-type your query

 

 

Thanks.  As a point of clarification, the issue isn't that I lose what I was typing in Alfred.  It's not as if I get very far anyway.  The issue is as I'm typing, the keyboard input suddenly gets redirected to the Finder, which can make a mess if I don't notice.

[vitor]

Also, for anyone landing on this later, this has been reported before and is an open feature request, in case you want to follow that.

Edited April 3, 2016 by Vítor

[Andrew]

This is a really awkward issue to address, as even if Alfred DIDN'T close (hide) at this point, OS X / Finder would still steal the focus away from him.

 

I'll open a new Apple TSI to ask about this, but I have a previous TSI which was closed a few years back saying nothing could be done in this case.

[vitor]

Just tested this with Spotlight, and it behaves the same as Alfred. If Apple’s doesn’t have an exception to the behaviour of its own tool, Alfred might not have much of a chance either.

[juliosecco]

could it be possible to have Alfred listening for running applications, and have it showing an alert when active app is closing, such as a large type message before hiding itself?

it would maybe be a good way just to alert the user, on the ( rarely ) situations when such thing happens... 

or maybe I'm simplifying the stuff too much?

Edited April 4, 2016 by juliosecco

[deanishe]

A possible method, perhaps?

• Active application switches
• Before hiding its window, Alfred checks if previously active application is still running
  • If not, then the app probably quit. Alfred stays visible.
  • If it is still running, hide Alfred's window.

I don't know if that's feasible.

[Andrew]

I don't think there is an available fix without a fudge, and seeing as a fix to this would have an intrinsic roll on effect to Alfred's core behaviour (every single time you use him) makes me extremely reluctant to change anything in Alfred with regards to this.

 

Take for example checking running apps, Alfred would have to actually hide to know which app is active as Alfred is the active app when visible (even as a Panel, when OS X shows a different app name in the titlebar). Then Alfred would have to re-show and steal focus by force. This may be unintended behaviour as there are legitimate times when apps launch in the background without stealing focus.

 

Either way, I've raised a developer ticket with Apple, so I'm going to wait and see what they say with this. As Vitor notes, you see the same behaviour with Spotlight so I suspect the real fix to this is in OS X / Finder not stealing focus when an app finishes quitting.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

[juliosecco]

OK I understand and agree,

thank you so much Andrew!

 

Giulio