Launchbar chrome12/1/2023 ![]() If you're not familiar with Hazel, it adds abilities similar to email rules and filters - and then some - to the Mac filesystem. The latest major update to Hazel, the file and folder automation tool from Noodlesoft, is here and it's just as invaluable as its predecessor. All it takes is a little setup in the appropriate Mac utility. Perhaps if you're a true GIF connoisseur you need multiple search engines at your fingertips. Alfred's documentation gives "maps" as an example: you can choose Apple or Google Maps after typing your search terms. There are subtle differences: Alfred interprets the input "gif " at once, while LaunchBar changes from search to text entry mode after hitting space. In the end, the setup in LaunchBar, Alfred, or any other launcher app is about the same complexity it's a matter of choosing the one that works the best for you. Clicking on the name brings up a contextual menu where I can assign the logical abbreviation. I typed 'giphy' to find my new template and then did the one thing I never think to do in LaunchBar: reach for the mouse. This is done from the main LaunchBar interface, not the index setup window. The other option is to assign a custom abbreviation. I could put 'gif' in the title - something like "Giphy gif search" - but that's inelegant. Since LaunchBar finds items by letters in their names, typing G-I-F won't find it! There are two possible solutions. But I named my LaunchBar search template 'Giphy'. Stephen set it to 'gif', sensibly enough. One benefit of the slightly more complex Alfred workflow is that it specifies a keyword. The browser handled percent-encoding the spaces and Giphy automagically converted them to hyphens! It also redirected the base of the URL from /tags/ to /search, adding a little time to the page load - I adjusted my template accordingly. ![]() I thought this might make it impossible to create a corresponding LaunchBar template - what if Giphy really chokes on spaces in URLs? I headed over to Chrome and manually typed in a test URL. The script also does some preprocessing, taking out spaces in the search terms and replacing them with hyphens. Cribbing from Stephen's script, the search terms come after /tags/. All that's necessary is to run a search on the site in question and replace the part of the URL corresponding to your search terms with an asterisk. If I need to automate a repeated searching task, I set up a custom search template in LaunchBar. It's just two lines, but as a longtime LaunchBar user it seemed…complicated. Drop me a line in the comments.The workflow itself is a shell script which takes input, does some text replacement, and opens a URL. I f yes, I would like to hear your reasons, and perhaps, get a few new interesting automation tips from you. I am interested to know if you are still using a custom app launcher for macOS. ![]() I still don't like the Spotlight UI, but am aware that the index is used in many more apps beyond the app launching itself. I am still used Launchbar as my day-to-day app launcher, even though it has been years since I stopped disabling the Spotlight indexing process. Launchbar builds its own index and it is very fast and fine-grained to exactly an app launcher would need. At the time, I had manually knocked out the Spotlight indexing process, in order to save CPU cycles and spare my HDD (yeah, it was quite some time ago). At first, I believe, I started using the free version of Alfred some years ago, but then I moved over to Launchbar when I realized that Alfred still pretty much relies on the Spotlight index for everything. There was a time, when I could swear my allegiance to one app launcher or another, as long as it was not Spotlight. ![]()
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