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Pretty Good Hat

Alfred 2 workflows - managing a to-do list

Rain here at high altitude since Friday, which is very unusual for wintertime. The landscape has melted and we can see our sodden backyard once again.

Cooped up, I turned to extra cups of coffee and playing with Alfred 2 workflows.

A few years ago I worked up a system using Alfred 1 to add items to a task list that gets displayed on my desktop with Geektool. The list itself is a Taskpaper compatible text file, and I use a TextMate bundle that I put together (derived from the Tasks bundle along with it.

With Alfred 2 it was fun to recreate and add to the functionality of my old script using workflows. I invoke the workflow with “do something” to add something to the top of my task list; later, “done something” will mark that item as completed and add a timestamp: Alfred uses the query you specify to find matching entries in the todo file, and acts on the one you select from that list of matches.

Here’s a quick tour. Adding an item via Alfred 2 and viewing the new entry in TextMate:


Then using Alfred 2 to find the same item and mark it as completed. You get a confirmation via growl and can see the updated item in TextMate:



I have some ideas to clean up and improve this workflow but do plan to release it. If you’re interested in seeing it now in all its ugly works-for-me state, just let me know.

So far it’s been lots of fun to work with the Alfred 2. If you’re an Alfred user considering the upgrade, I recommend checking it out!