Use auto expanding keywords for snippets as triggers for workflows

[kizu]

In Alfred 3 there are automatically expanded snippets by keywords. They are awesome and work almost flawlessly after enabling the appropriate accessibility feature.

 

As I understand, as you already have the code for detecting those keywords (I guess, by catching the consecutive key presses?), it shouldn't be hard to allowing using those keywords to trigger workflow actions.

 

This would allow us to call workflows from any textual input. So, instead of at first calling Alfred or a specific command here, you could just write the keyword for this command and alfred would either call the action or present you with the alfred input window for your workflow.

 

After calling the workflow the keyword should be deleted from the input, and you should have a way to replace it with the workflow's result.

 

That's the basic what could be done with catching the keywords, but what would be even cooler — catching non-static keywords by regexps. Instead of a static keyword like `foobar`, you could set it to `foo(\d+)bar`, for example, and it would call the workflow as soon as you'd write somewhere `foo1bar`, `foo3434bar` etc., with the variable parts of the regex match as input you could use in your workflow.

 

This would open a lot of possibilities for workflow authors.

[juliosecco]

Agree, +1 

 

     Giulio

[_Sascha_]

More detailed request, but already requested here.

 

+1 | Here, too.

[bobvork]

+1, registered here to suggest this!

[FroZen_X]

+1 that's a cool idea, those possibilities. 

[rafegoldberg]

Now this is an awesome idea...

[FroZen_X]

Check this out: https://twitter.com/boastr_net/status/736845599128100864

Gotta have to play around with it, but this and Alfred 3 in combination....holy moly

[aaron]

+1, also registered here just to suggest this!

 

This would make it possible for me to drop TextExpander.

[chill]

Hi, is there any update from the developers on the last part of this feature with regex matching? 

[Andrew]

@chill snippet triggers were added in Alfred 3.4

 

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/triggers/snippet/

 

As for regex matching of snippet keywords, this isn't available.

 

Cheers,

Andrew