When I tried to install the debian package through the Ubuntu Software Center I received this warning:
The package is of bad quality
The installation of a package which violates the quality standards isn't allowed. This could cause serious problems on your computer. Please contact the person or organisation who provided this package file and include the details beneath.
Lintian check results for /home/<user>/Downloads/zazu-v0.2.1-linux-x64.deb:
E: zazu: maintainer-address-missing Blaine Schmeisser
I just installed on a fresh install of Ubuntu, but maybe this is debian specific. It looks like I just need to add my email address to the author field, I'll try and release again today with that fix and one other! :D
I second the sentiments on cross platform! I use MacOS + Linux at work and Windows + Linux at home, so quality cross-platform software is great for consistency.
I was able to install without warning now. However, the alt+space command doesn't seem to work. That instead opens the context menu in the app that has focus. I can use Zazu by clicking the menu bar icon and choosing 'Toggle Zazu' though.
So Zazu is based on Alfred which was based on Quicksilver[1]. As someone who never left Quicksilver in the first place, what are some of the improvements that either alternative brings to the table?
I haven't installed Quick Silver in many years, so my understanding may be dated, but at the time it didn't offer many intuitive actions, such as copying the calculator result to your clipboard.
Alfred doesn't treat plugins as first class citizens, only alfred can have the top level search space, all plugins have prefixes. Plugins in Zazu are first class citizens, there is no built in behavior so you have more flexibility with what you want.
Zazu is also cross platform, so switching between Mac and Ubuntu for instance wouldn't hurt your workflow. Alfred and QuickSilver are Mac specific.
I tried switching from QS to Alfred ages ago, since Quicksilver development has been stagnant for over 5 years (it's still being updated, but just barely — mostly just compatibility-related improvements).
So obviously you can deduce from my last sentence that the biggest advantage Alfred offers is that it's actually under active development. New features are added pretty regularly. Just last month they added some new stuff. Nothing game-changing IMO, but it's a massive difference from Quicksilver. (New features occasionally appear in the QS change log, but they're almost universally trivial — for example, in the latest release they made it prompt you for what to do when there's a file-rename conflict. That's the level of 'feature addition' you can expect from QS.)
As a result of this active development, Alfred has a vibrant community. Their developers are easy to reach via social media and e-mail, they have a forum, a blog, tech support people, &c. They have lots of users who like to share their work-flows and settings. Quicksilver's community was once like that, but it hasn't been for many years. I don't think most people even realise it's still around. The Web-site design/structure hasn't been updated since ~2010, giving the impression that the project is abandoned. Much of its extended functionality is buried in esoteric third-party plug-ins, and documentation is often out-of-date or simply non-existent.
Alfred is much prettier by default, its configuration interface is so much more elegant and intuitive, and it's a lot more dynamic in the sense that the UI can be moulded to better suit certain features (for example, the music-player feature adds media control buttons to the interface). The Quicksilver interface is pretty much static no matter what you're doing, and it's honestly not suited for a lot of the functionality people have tried to inject into it (like clipboard management).
Alfred is also vastly more stable and reliable. Hard lock-ups and silent crashes are an almost weekly occurrence for me on Quicksilver, and the auto-updater seems to break periodically, so that every 3 to 6 months i have to go manually download the latest version from the Web site.
With all of that said, i'm still using Quicksilver, and the #1 reason for that is the fact that it handles its own catalogue index. Quicksilver has very powerful custom file-indexing options, so that for example you can control exactly what types of files it catalogues under what directories, how many levels deep it goes, &c. Alfred, meanwhile, uses Spotlight, and only provides global (as opposed to per-directory) toggles for a few basic file types like 'folders' and 'images'. As a result, finding things in git repository directories and similar complex file structures can be very tedious.
The other main advantage QS has over Alfred is that it's free and open-source, which is important to some people... but it's not to me. If it weren't for my very particular file-indexing needs, i would definitely switch to Alfred.
Yes, since the first file finder needed to be cross platform I create a cache in the plugin, but a mac specific one would be great! :D
Technically it spins up another process and recursively goes through a whitelisted set of directories. It caches just the app locations, not all the files.
I haven't heard of lacona until you just mentioned it, but it does look nice. They also have plugins written in node, but offer a more "natural language" search, which Zazu doesn't. Zazu is also completely open source, but they have a paid version. Zazu is all cross platform, but Lacona only offers mac builds.
I'm a big power user of Alfred. I've created a lot of custom workflows in Alfred to automate things in macOS, such as setting up dev environments (window management) or using the Dash workflow integration. The power of Alfred is in its workflows and workflow creator. Alfred + Hammerspoon is particularly nice. (You can execute hotkeys in Alfred that trigger Hammerspoon init.lua bindings)
I can't tell if Zazu is just a replacement for simple app launching, or if it has the ability to do everything Alfred's workflows can do.
Zazu does allow for keyboard shortcuts, and can do everything the Alfred workflows can, but does not currently provide a GUI for creating the workflows. The biggest difference for the plugins, is that they are written in Node so they can be cross platform.
Thanks. The workflow creator GUI is the big seller for Alfred, it saves a lot of time in testing and tweaking workflows and from having to write a bunch of boilerplate.
I'm a big user of Alfred, and I installed Hammerspoon a while back, but I have yet to actually do a single thing with Hammerspoon. I'm curious if you can provide any examples of what you use Hammerspoon for.
I use it to setup dev environments' windows. For example, a hotkey that launches the following configuration automatically in about 14 seconds (this is my primary coding setup).
1. 3 terminals and 1 Finder each in a quadrant on Space 1
2. Two Chrome windows, full-screened and placed into split-view next to each other (split view is when you hold down the minimize button for a bit to put two full-screen apps next to each other)
3. Sublime Text 3, full-screened.
4. Dash (doc app) full-screened and placed split-view with another full-screened Chrome window.
Basically automates the windows I would setup manually every time I reboot and want to code.
Over in Windows land, I used AutoHotkey for years for all sorts of things, so Hammerspoon is comfortable for me.
Is there any information on how you can run hammer spoon lua bindings from Alfred? I always wanted to call specific functions from hammer spoon from applescript or something but have no idea how you could do that.
I have installed the latest version 0.3.2 for Ubuntu 16.04 via the Software Center, and also via Gdebi (which reported that it was already installed, but reinstalled) and I am unable to find the installation anywhere. No config files in my home directory. A search in Nautilus only finds the .deb. What am I missing? I am running Budgie desktop, if that makes a difference.
+1 for clipboard history easily searchable. I think in my workflow it's adding so
much to my personal productivy. Maybe the best productivy hack in Alfred.
got it running on osx, first it didn't worked (nothing suggested), then i've restarted it and it seems to work.
pretty basic, but it more or less match my needs.
the only thing that i miss is the file icons or app icons:
it show you multiple match but the icons are all the same, dark, so you can't quickly disambiguate them
I love this thing so far. I recently switched to using Mint instead of OSX because I refuse to pay $2300 for a 15" MBP. I was really missing the clipboard ability of Alfred, and this is REALLY helpful.
Would it be possible to auto paste the clipboard result when you select it?
When I tried to install the debian package through the Ubuntu Software Center I received this warning: