I am trying to move from LaunchBar to Alfred with Powerpack.
One of the features I immediately miss from LaunchBar is “Instant Send” where I can press a key (Alt, in my case) and then the current selected item (text or image or file or folder or whatever) is immediately sent to LaunchBar ready to be passed on to other apps or ready for one of its context menu items.
Alfred can send files and folders but not text.
I tried creating a simple macro in Keyboard Maestro that would copy the selected text then press Cmd + Space and paste.
My questions are:
Is there a way to set macro trigger key to double tap of Alt key? I only see Tab, Return, Enter, Space and Escape.
Is there a better way to send the selected item (text or file or folder or anything else) to Alfred using KM?
The answer to your first question is "no", but the answer to your second is "yes". Here's a simple macro I use myself to approximate LaunchBar's Instant Send with Alfred:
Incidentally, I run LaunchBar and Alfred with Powerpack simultaneously, and enjoy both for different reasons, and I'd suggest that you don't need to completely abandon the former just to take advantage of the benefits of the latter
Since creating the topic, I've discovered that Alfred comes built-in with an example workflow called "Show Alfred with selected text" which is exactly what I am looking for.
So it does! I never found this sample workflow before, since it was buried in (what I consider to be) the misleadingly named "templates" section. Thanks for the tip! If you haven't already discovered this yourself, you'll be glad to know that invoking Alfred with the current selection this way even allows for the Alt key double-tap option you asked about in your first question:
I'm afraid I don't know what to tell you: that's exactly what I did, and it worked fine for me, even with LaunchBar running at the same time. In the meantime, I tried exporting the workflow I set up that way, so maybe you can import it and get it working that way:
