Alfred and Marked = Beautiful Productivity
Introduction
From their respective websites, Alfred and Marked state that:
- Alfred is an award-winning productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web.
- Marked opens MultiMarkdown, Markdown, Text or HTML files and previews them as HTML documents.
Separately they are stellar applications that have changed the way I work. Together… Well, it’s a whole new ballgame!
The Itch
I keep a lot of notes and an assortment of other information in a folder that synchronizes with nvALT and Dropbox. Now while nvALT is a great application to create, search, synchronize and view notes, Marked has a few advantages such as TOC, export, word count and well let’s face it, it just makes the whole thing look beautiful!
The Cure
Alfred introduced Filters a while back and a little later on (v1.1) added the ability to to define custom actions for filters. In practical terms this means that it is now possible to create a Script Extension to act upon a Search Filter.
In my particular case, I created a new script to open a file in Marked and saved it.
I then created a Filter to search for text files, set the scope to the folder where they are stored and as an action choose the previously created script extension.
Update: If you store your files in a format other than .txt, then add it to the File Types list. (Thanks @nir_)
All that is left now is to call up Alfred, type the keyword I choose, part of the filename, content, spotlight comment and hit enter.
Download
To make things a little easier, I’ve created the two extensions. All you need now is to import them into alfred and tweak as needed! Enjoy
Get them here
Credits
Marked icon property of marked. Notebook icon property of McDo Design