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Alfred 3 snippets don't auto-expand [Fix awaiting chromium bug fix]


stever777

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Hi Andrew, only some of the snippets are marked red, but I don't see the collection being shared at all.  Also some of my settings aren't being sycned

 

 

Any of the snippets marked red in dropbox will need to be renamed in Alfred (or you could just rename them in Finder until they go green), they should then sync.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

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Hi there,

 

Could anybody who is still experiencing issues with text expansion please update to the b655 pre-release to let me know if that helps.

 

While we haven't been able to reproduce this issue yet, I've made some general changes to the way Alfred expands text.

 

Many thanks,

Andrew

 

 

 

Hi Andrew,

 

I'm afraid that doesn't fix the issue for me. As mentioned in my email, I can make this happen every time by bringing up the LastPass menu in Safari (make sure you're logged in first though to bring this up! The password dropbox doesn't affect the snippets, only the menu once it's logged in).

 

Did you try the same at your end?

 

Cheers,

Tarique.

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Hi Andrew,

 

I'm afraid that doesn't fix the issue for me. As mentioned in my email, I can make this happen every time by bringing up the LastPass menu in Safari (make sure you're logged in first though to bring this up! The password dropbox doesn't affect the snippets, only the menu once it's logged in).

 

Did you try the same at your end?

 

Cheers,

Tarique.

 

 

I didn't manage to reproduce this, however, I've overhauled the text expansion listener for 3.0.1 b661 to something which should prove to be more reliable.

 

Would you please update and let me know if you are still experiencing the issue with Alfred / LastPass?

 

Many thanks,

Andrew

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Hi Andrew,

 

Just upgraded. Unfortunately, that one still has the problem. Weird one this. Not sure why I can make it happen all the time. I wonder if there's something else at play here too?

 

I did uninstall lastPass and cleaned out all the prefs, etc for the same. Re-installed, and it still exhibited the same issues. Very confused now!

 

Cheers,

Tarique.

Edited by tnaseem
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Just upgraded. Unfortunately, that one still has the problem. Weird one this. Not sure why I can make it happen all the time. I wonder if there's something else at play here too?

 

 

I've been attempting to replicate the issue in Safari with LastPass but haven't been able to stop Alfred from expanding at this point.

 

Could you please help me replicate exactly with a few more details?

 

- How do you pop up the LastPass panel in Safari on the favourites page? I can only get the LastPass panel to pop up when I'm on a page for which it has a bookmark at this point.

- What hotkey is set in LastPass?

- What versions are you using (OS X, Safari and LastPass)?

 

Anything else you can think of, other browser plugins, etc that could help me get to the bottom of this would be great. Thanks for your help :)

 

Vero

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Hi Vero,

 

- To bring up the LastPass menu, I just click on the toolbar icon. Comes up all the time, regardless of the page being displayed. Not sure why this isn't working for you?

 

- I don't have any hotkeys set up in LastPass. I just click on the toolbar icon to work with it.

 

- OSX 10.11.5 / Safari 9.1.1 (11601.6.17) / LastPass 4.1.1

 

- Other plugins installed: Adblock Plus 1.11 / Evernote Web Clipper 6.7 / Pinbar 2.78 / Save to pocket 1.9.19 / LiveReload 2.1.0

 

​Weird Discovery...

Now, I was wondering why you couldn't recreate it at your end, so I started to do some digging around here, and I think I may have found the reason why it's working for you, and not for me...

 

When logging into LastPass I have the 'Remember Email' ticked all the time. With this ticked, and when I log in, and THEN bring up the menu afterwards, this is when the snippets stop working.

 

Now, on another one my hunches (I seem to have a lot of these. Quasimodo would be very proud) I decided to log out and restart Safari to reset it. This time I un-ticked the 'Remember Email' when logging in. Brought up the LastPass menu again, and this time it didn't affect the snippets at all. They carried on working.

 

Did this a few times, and couldn't make the snippets stop working. So, I tried it with the 'Remember Email' ticked again, and this time the snippets stopped working again. So, it's something to do with remembering the email. Very strange.

 

So, can you try the same thing your end? ie. make sure 'Remember Email' is ticked when logging in?

 

So, to reproduce:

 

- Click on the LastPass toolbar icon.

- Type in your email address.

- Type in your password.

- Click 'Remember Email'.

- Click 'Log In'.

- Check a snippet. Should work fine.

- Now click the LastPass toolbar icon again to bring up it's menu.

- Type a snippet again. This time it won't work.

 

Hope this drivel makes sense! Being a developer myself I know it's a real pain trying to find bugs like this until you can recreate the issue consistently. Nothing worse than bug hunting these kinds of problems!

 

Let me know how you get on!

 

Cheers,

Tarique.

 

Edit: Just an update for what it's worth. I uninstalled all the plugins apart from LastPass, and that didn't make a difference to this issue. Just a heads up really. :)

Edited by tnaseem
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Hi Vero,

So, to reproduce:

 

 

Hi Tarique,

 

First, thank you so much for your patience and your thorough help (and sense of humour about it all!) 

 

While I'm still unable to reproduce the issue, Andrew and I have spent the past few hours investigating this further, and there's a new build out on the pre-release (build 663) which may help Alfred recognise your snippets being typed regardless of LastPass. Could you please update to the latest build and let me know whether it resolves the issue for you? 

 

Cheers,

Vero
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Hi Vero,

 

I'm afraid it's still exhibiting the same problems on the new build (663).

 

What I might do is prise one of my kids Macbooks off them and test on that. I'm wondering why the issue isn't reproducible on your machines, so makes me think there's something else at play here. Actually, while I'm at it, I'll try under a new user account too.

 

If you can wait until tomorrow, that'd be great. 2.30am here, and I've already turned into a pumpkin. :) Time for bed!

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Hi Vero,

 

I'm afraid it's still exhibiting the same problems on the new build (663).

 

If you can wait until tomorrow, that'd be great. 2.30am here, and I've already turned into a pumpkin. :) Time for bed!

 

 

Thanks again so much - I did wonder how you were still up at such a late hour in NZ!

 

Here's where we're at now: On looking at LastPass's forum, it looks like this isn't the first time a text expansion app encounters this issue. I'm attempting to get in contact with LastPass to see if I can get their cooperation in dealing with this.

 

Essentially, what's happening is that LastPass/Safari is enabling secure text entry on the Mac, and then not releasing it, which means that apps like Alfred Text Service no longer receive input. In this case, the suggested way to fix the issue is to quit Safari, as you've seen.

 

This is obviously an issue, as here's an Apple Tech Note on how applications should use the secure text entry fairly, and some apps either don't, or have a bug:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2150/_index.html

 

Cheers,

Vero
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It looks like this is the issue getting in the way of Alfred's text expansion:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=258882

 

It looks like there is recent activity here with a reproducible case for chromium, so we can hope for a fix!

 

This issue has been going on since 2010 though:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=258882

 

Cheers,

Andrew

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Hi Vero / Andrew,

 

That makes total sense now.

 

Although, I don't normally use Dash's snippet expansion, I thought I'd just try that with the LastPass plugin too. It appears that LastPass is affecting its snippet expansion too! So, it's definitely not isolated to Alfred.

 

I apologise for not doing this earlier. It's only just occurred to me now to try it, after your replies. Really sorry for giving you the runaround with this!

 

Cheers,

Tarique.

Edited by tnaseem
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I apologise for not doing this earlier. It's only just occurred to me now to try it, after your replies. Really sorry for giving you the runaround with this!

 

 

Please don't apologise! This was an important process to help us identify the issue, which we now have a much better understanding of!

 

Many thanks,

Andrew

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Just a head up... I sent a support request to LastPass (I'm a paid up member), and this was their response:

 

 

 

This issue is fixed in the latest release of LastPass plugin on Safari. However, due to an Apple's bug, end users cannot install the latest version until Apple resolves the issue on their end. At this point, I am afraid there is not much LastPass can do. Please use Chrome as a workaround in the meantime. Kindly let me know if you have further questions.

 

Ah well...

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello i am new to the Alfred Forum. I have been in the Information Technology field for over 10 yrs. I was experiencing the same issues with snippet auto expansion not working and it looks like different fixes for different people so i just wanted to tell everyone what fixed the auto expansion for me. I was using a Antivirus app called Webroot. webroot has a feature called secure keyboard entry. As soon as i disabled this...walla auto expansion worked. Just as an FYI this same webroot feature stops dictation on the MAC also. I hope this helps someone. 

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I had an issue with Snippets where they stopped responding (3.1, 718).  It wouldn't work in any application anywhere.  I disable the accessibility and re-enabled.  The checked the Snippets.  Finally, rebooted and it was working again.  I'm on a laptop and very often suspend/resume and think this might be related, but this is, regrettably, a hard instance to track down.  I'll keep an eye on it and post anything further that I notice.

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18 hours ago, tagyoureit said:

I had an issue with Snippets where they stopped responding (3.1, 718).  It wouldn't work in any application anywhere.  I disable the accessibility and re-enabled.  The checked the Snippets.  Finally, rebooted and it was working again.  I'm on a laptop and very often suspend/resume and think this might be related, but this is, regrettably, a hard instance to track down.  I'll keep an eye on it and post anything further that I notice.

 

It's likely that you're experiencing the same issue as other users where secure input isn't released correctly by a plugin or app that requires it, and restarting your Mac simply reset the secure input. Next time, instead of rebooting, try quitting browsers to see whether it's a plugin like LastPass at the source of the issue. :)

 

Cheers,
Vero

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  • 1 month later...

Hi everyone,

 

Still not sure if it's relevant but hope it could help someone.

 

I was struggling to fix my snippets auto-expand feature. Read all the threads on the topic, checked all the Safari plugins, Google Chrome issue, Accessibility re-enabling trick, quitting all the apps, checking non-standard apps like Karabiner-Elements (which I suspected first), rebooting my laptop dozens of times while trying to fix an issue, etc. Literally everything. Nothing helped. Still wasn't able to fix my snippets expansion.

 

So after trying everything I decided to load my system (macOS Sierra, 10.12 with Alfred 3.1.1 Build 736) in a ’Safe mode’ without any ’Login Items’ or whatsoever. There I loaded Alfred and everything was perfectly fine - snippets where auto-expanding. So I concluded that it must've been some kind of a conflict with apps I used in a normal mode. After loading all the apps possible I still wasn't able to break auto-expansion, therefore I decided that it was some kind of a system underhood stuff which wasn't breaking Alfred in a safe mode but obviously was when I loaded my system in a usual way. Well, desperate, I decided to load my system back and wait for a fix from Alfred authors in the future. Anyway, I wasn't able to write a propper bug-report with any adequate reproducing steps (cause it just didn't work, without any obvious steps to make it so).

 

Imaginge my surprise when after loading my system back I found out that Alfred snippets auto-expansion feature was perfectly fine. I tried to load anything unusual to reproduce the previous issue, but it seems nothing could break auto-expansion anymore. Still works for me, even though I'm not sure if it was a 'Safe mode' which fixed it. Anyway, if you tried everything and all the tips failed try and reload your system with a Shift button pressed. I bet it won't make any harm but could bring your snippets back! Good luck!

Edited by Serge B.
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