Browse All Your Hook Bookmarks with Alfred — It’s a Great Launcher App for Your Mac

Alfred by Running with Crayons is a fantastic launcher for macOS. Using the Alfred workflow created by CogSci Apps, you can retrieve all your Hook bookmarks with Alfred.

1. Be sure to buy the Alfred Powerpack from Running with Crayons. It’s affordable and supports the development of great Mac software!
2. Download the workflow mentioned above.
3. Install it (double-click).

Once you’ve installed the workflow, just invoke Alfred and type “hm” to “Browse Hook Bookmarks”. You can set your own abbreviation.

You can use Hook and Alfred together in other ways to boost your productivity.

Related information and screencast

We have not yet developed a screencast to demonstrate the Alfred workflow. However, we recently created one for LaunchBar, and it works in the same way. See Four Ways to Use LaunchBar and Hook Together: For Faster Information Retrieval. That page also has other tips that apply to Alfred too.

Some of us here at CogSci Apps use Alfred, others LaunchBar. We love them both!

Another tip: create .hook files to access items via launchers

If you want to use several different abbreviations in Alfred (or LaunchBar) for the same item, you can create one .hook file for each abbreviation. Just name the .hook file to be whatever abbreviation you want. You can even pack two or three wanted abbreviations in the alternate filename.

Here’s how:

1. invoke Hook on the item.
2. type ⇧⌘H (or from the Title menu select Make Hook File).

See Make Hook File.

For instance, I am writing this blog post in a text editor. The filename is “md-Alfred and Hook.txt”. I want my launcher to know it as “blalf” or “blog alfred”, so I created a .hook file called “blog Alfred”. The launcher quickly learns those abbreviations without me needing to define the abbreviation.

You may be thinking? Why don’t I just use a Finder alias. The answer is simple .hook files can be created for any linkable item, not just files 🙂 .

See the Linkable apps page to get a taste of some of the apps that are linkable. As an example, you can also create .hook links to emails, Things or OmniFocus tasks, and items in personal information managers such as DEVONthink, EagleFiler, Evernote or Yojimbo.

Sharing

We’ve provided one workflow, but you might want to write others. If you want to share some of your Alfred workflows, please head over to Share your Workflows – Alfred App Community Forum. And please also let the Hook community know that you’ve done that, over at “Share your Hook scripts topics” of the Hook Productivity Forum.

While we’re on the topic of sharing automation: if you have automations to share that work directly with Hook’s AppleScript, please head over to the Hook Productivity Forum’s “Share your Hook scripts” topics.