Alfred 2 Add To Temp workflow
Monday, August 15, 2016
As someone who surfs the net every single day, there will be times where I find something interesting and want to note it down. It usually comes in the form of a link. There are many apps out there that allows you to jot down random notes really quickly, but it still requires some mouse clicks or quite a few key strokes.
Simple note taking shortcut.With the help of Alfred* as a digital assistant, I can create small scripts that reduce the amount of actions required. I'm using the paid (powerpack) version in case you're curious.
*only for MacOS
The scripts are called "workflows" in Alfred, it's a relatively simple IFTTT (if this then that) kind of idea.
As you can see, it's really simple, and it's relatively easy to make your custom workflows too as long as you know a bit of bash, or python, etc.
"att" is just a keyword that I chose (add to temp) for appending any of my note to this temporary file; while "temp" is a keyword for opening/viewing the saved snippets. Words aren't as effective as a simple gif, so here.
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| Native notification to show appended text! |
As you can see, it allows your snippet to be of any length, even multiline paragraphs works as expected. It is also tagged with Date/Time to make searching a little bit easier. On the topic of searching, I may add that feature to this workflow so that I can search through the notes from Alfred itself, though I'm pretty sure that the "find" function in Sublime Text will beat any kind of search algorithm I can come up with.
With this, I can add any note within 4 actions.
Copy text, open prompt, att, pasteSince I don't have a place to host the .workflow file, let me just share with you the secret sauce that makes all of this works. It's just a 1 line bash command. Formatting the date, time, then passing in the {argument} that Alfred receives then appending it all into a text file. That's it!
printf "$(date +%d-%m-%y) | $(date +%r)\n{query}\n\n" >> ~/Documents/scripts/temp.txt
Well, hope you guys like this little cheat that I've shared. I still haven't test it out in school yet but it has proven rather effective in normal use. Next post shall be on the text expander that I use to reduce the amount of repetitive typing I have to do, stay tuned!