Alfred Workflow for Obsidian 🎩

[pseudometa]

Version 2.0 of the Alfred Workflow for Obsidian has been released!

Feature Overview

• Features marked with the emoji are newly introduced in version 2.0.
• Features marked with been improved with version 2.0. Refer to the documentation to see what’s new.

Powerful Alfred-based Quick Switcher

• Search Notes
• Open Notes in new pane, append to notes, copy Markdown links, …
• Includes Aliases
• Search Headings (included heading levels configurable)
• Search Starred Notes
• Search Recent Notes
• Browse folders (move to parent folders, create notes in folders)
• Search Notes via Tags
• Browse a note’s links (outgoing, backlinks, external)
• Open External Links of a Note (without switching to the document or opening Obsidian)
• Graph Traversal via Alfred
• Smart Search: A query like o foobar #moc starred displays only files named foobar with the tag #moc that are also starred.

Utility Features

• OCR Screenshots
• Paste URL into selection
• Move Note to a different folder
• Create a new Note
• Backup your Vault
• Dual Mode (Edit + Preview)
• Conveniently access various folders like .obsidian or .trash
• Multi-Vault-Support: Switch the Vault controlled by this workflow
• Daily Notes
• Carl Auto-Responses

Plugin & Theme Search

• Create new Notes (based on Template or via QuickAdd)
• Search Community Plugins and Themes
• Open in Obsidian or GitHub
• Access Plugin Settings
• Search & Create GitHub Issues
• No annoyed developers! When the installed version is out of date, issue creation is blocked and replaced by a shortcut to update the plugin instead.

Workspace Switcher

• Quickly switch Workspaces
• Manage Workspaces
• Automatically toggle Spellchecking when switching to certain workspaces

Documentation Search

• Search the Official Obsidian Documentation
• Simultaneously search the Obsidian Hub
• Search the Forum

CSS-related Features

• Access themes & CSS Snippets via Alfred
• Create new Snippets from Clipboard content
• Quick Access to cheat sheets for theme development, e.g. default variables
• Download a theme’s CSS file via Theme Search
• Convert a font file base64-encoded CSS

Features for Developers

• Quick Access to cheat sheets for Plugin Development, e.g. Obsidian API
• Quickly open various development-related folders
• Clone a plugin’s repository via the Plugin Search
• Open the Vault’s root in the default Terminal or in Finder
• Add & Update Beta Plugins via BRAT

→ Full Documentation & Usage Guide
→ Download the latest Release

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[seishonagon]

This is a really neat set of tools. The OCR thing in itself make everything worth it. Now you and @hause need to get together and streamline all your Alfred functionalities in ONE workflow - Actually, I’d be glad to help even though my script-fu is weak.

[hause]

Yeh, cool stuff indeed! If you (or anyone) wants to try to integrate our workflows, I’d be happy to help, so reach out here or on my github repo. For now, I’d like to keep my workflow simple and lightweight.

[seishonagon]

Actually for now I’m running both and I realised there is very little overlap, so everything works pretty well. Just a couple tweaks of the keywords. If I need to scratch the itch further, I’ll look into it.

[pseudometa]

Right, I think I found the workflow from @hause at some point. But since I neither use Obsidian for fleeting notes nor daily notes, I decided to create my own workflow at some point.

And indeed, there is little overlap, so there is little reason to not run them both if you want?

[pseudometa]

I’ll link your workflow on my repo though, as people who found my workflow will potentially also be interested in yours. (I’d be using your workflow, too, if I was was using daily notes and stuff )

[MartinplusM]

This is awesome, thanks for doing this!

What would be cool would be to be able to run fx a QuickAdd command straight from alfred, is this technically possible?

Thank you again!

[pseudometa]

yep, thats possible by building a small Alfred Workflow:

1. Add the QuickAdd command you want to use to the command palette (the thunder symbol in the QuickAdd settings)
2. Using the Advanced URI Plugin, run the command Advanced Obsidian URI: Copy URI for command from the Command palette. Select “don’t specify a file” and then select the QuickAdd Command you have added in step 1.
3. You now have the URI in your clipboard that will open up Obsidian and run your desired QuickAdd command. You can create an Alfred keyword of your choice and have that keyword simply trigger the “Open URL Action” from Alfred. There, you paste the URI from your clipboard.
4. Since my Alfred workflow auto-updates, I believe it will remove your self-defined QuickAdd-Alfred-keyword. To avoid this, simply create a separate Alfred workflow for the keyword-trigger and Open-URL-Action.

Hope these instruction work for you? Unfortunately, I don’t know any more user-friendly method of implementing that in my workflow itself, otherwise I’d do it.

[MartinplusM]

@pseudometa U da man, now that is nifty!

On step 3, I added the URL to the Alfred > Features > Websearch list. Is this the ideal place to add it?

[pseudometa]

oh, you are right – just adding the URL the web searches is a simpler solution that also works just as well

[pseudometa]

Hey everyone,

Version 2.0 of my Alfred workflow for Obsidian has been released! I updated the opening post of this thread further above for folks finding this workflow for the first time. For all the people already using the workflow, here are some highlights what is new in version 2.0:

• Alfred-Based Quick Switcher now also searches folders, aliases, and headings (heading levels configurable)
• Browse your folder structure by going to parent folders or create notes in specific folders.
• Flat hierarchy? No Problem! Browse you vault based on tags: search for tags, and subsequently search a list of all files with that tag
• Link Search: search outlinks, backlinks, and external links. Can also be triggered via shift + ↵ on any other search.
• By chaining shift + ↵ multiple times, you can basically traverse your graph, completely via Alfred.
• Plugin & Theme Search can now also search/create GitHub issues. (No annoyed devs – when the local plugin is outdated, issue creation will be replaced by a shortcut to update the plugin instead. )
• The Documentation Search now also searches the Obsidian Hub!
• Smart Search Queries: A query like o foobar #moc starred will display only files named “foobar” with the tag “#moc” which are also starred.
• Overhaul of the codebase, resulting in a distinct speed improvement of all searches.
• To accommodate to all the new features, the documentation has now also been restructured into a small wiki.

Full list of Features
Download

BREAKING CHANGES

• The Workflow now relies on the metadata extractor; it will not work without the plugin.
• There are a number of smaller breaking changes. See the documentation.

Most of the new features are enabled by the invaluable Metadata Extractor Plugin, made by @koala. Big shoutout to their work on this! (And also many thanks to @Vinadon’s Advanced URI plugin, without which this workflow also wouldn’t be possible.)

[marcher]

Hey, @pseudometa. This is a fantastic workflow!

How difficult do you think it would be to increase the capability of the workflow to also include search on Finder as well ass raindrop.io? As a researcher, the thought of being able to search the files in my HD, my bookmarks on raindrop.io, and my notes on Obsidian sounds too good!

[mlevison]

I love this workflow but it in the past few days, it won’t open a note in Obsidian when I select a header. Unsure when it broke - perhaps Thur Mar 3/Fri 4?

Since then I’ve tried upgrading Obsidian to 0.13.30, I’ve rerun the OSetup command.

[pseudometa]

thanks! well, raindrop and Finder are totally different issues, so I think those are rather separate workflows.

However, there is already an Alfred workflow for raindrop.io, and you can already search Finder with Alfred’s built-in File search.

[pseudometa]

Strange, for me everything works. Sounds like it could be an issue with the Advanced URI plugin, which the workflow uses to open files.

• could you make sure you have the plugin enabled and up to date?
• if so, check whether the plugin works, by testing a heading URL scheme (remember to URL encode the parameters)
• if all does not work (or you are unexperienced with things like URL schemes), please open a bug report at GitHub

[mlevison]

It was advanced uri that got disabled. Strangely I don’t think I did this (at least intentionally).

Cheers
Mark