Attack on Life ⚔️

It’s been a few months since Alfred launched Universal Action, and I’ve gotten used to using it to address specific scenarios. Here, I’ll summarize the role of actions in enhancing my efficiency.

Positioning of Universal Action

Here, I will discuss the differences between this interaction method and the previous scenarios provided by Alfred, such as keywords and hotkeys.

Main Differences

The fundamental difference between Universal Action and previous scenarios lies in the trigger conditions. Universal Action is triggered when you select any element [file/link/text], and based on this input, a specific action is executed. For example, you can choose a piece of text to automatically post on Twitter, send an email, or choose a URL to open it in a browser automatically. Previously, actions were triggered directly by keywords or hotkeys. So, the main difference lies here.

Recently, while working on an open-source project, I was informed just before going live that copyright attribution needed to be added to every program file. Due to time constraints, I gave up on finding an automated solution and opted for manual editing. Resolving the issue took a few minutes of manual effort.

To efficiently solve similar problems in the future, an efficient/automated method is needed. Manual editing is cumbersome and prone to errors, especially when dealing with hundreds of program files.

During the holidays, I researched the feasibility of performing this operation within the IDE and discovered a solution.

The following method uses JB company’s IDEs, such as WebStorm and IntelliJ IDEA.

Add Copyright to Multi Files

If you want to add a copyright to existing files in a project uniformly, you can follow the steps below:

It’s been a while since I last updated an Alfred Workflow article, so here’s a recent small development.

During work, I often enable Mac’s Do Not Disturb mode to focus on coding and avoid bombardment from high-frequency messages like WeChat/QQ. However, I need to turn it off after work. Moving the mouse to the right side to turn it off is inefficient, and setting up hotkeys requires memorizing complex combinations. Neither of these approaches feels programmer-like, so I created a workflow for quick toggling.

Effect

Type ‘disturb’ and press Enter to toggle.

JetBrains WebStorm is my primary tool for code development, which is more suitable for full project development, while VSC is a lightweight development editor. For instance, sometimes, I use it to handle an Nginx configuration or a test HTML file. Therefore, the two do not conflict—one is a heavy-duty weapon, and the other is a lightweight submachine gun. Turning VSC into a powerful tool requires investment because it lacks many built-in features. Therefore, it requires installing a relatively large number of plugins.

Here, I list some of the plugins I have installed.

It is continuously updated and adjusted.

Auto Rename Tag

Automatically renames paired tags.

Sometimes you need to quickly query the Mac system version information or memory information. The normal operation is to click the Apple icon in the upper right corner of the screen =>About This Mac=>Then look for information on the corresponding Tab page =>Select copy, which is a bit troublesome.

So, taking advantage of the holidays, I quickly made a workflow to quickly obtain basic system information.

Screenshot

Note: Select a single item and press Enter to copy it to the system clipboard.

Download link:：https://github.com/alanhe421/alfred-workflows/tree/master/about-mac