I have used application launchers on my Mac for quite a few years, going back to the old Quicksilver days[1] , but I have to admit that I have mainly used them to (you guessed it), launch applications.
When Quicksilver went on its hiatus, I decided to look for an alternative, and started using Alfred. It quickly became my go-to application for launching applications and files on my Mac, but when I purchased the Powerpack, I decided I’d better start getting my money’s worth and learn how to do as much as possible with it.
It occurred to me the other day that using Alfred to search Evernote would be really useful, so I started trying to figure out how to do that.
I was not at all surprised to find that Stephen Millard over at Thought Asylum has already done the hard work for us. He has a series of two blog posts in which he shows how to search Evernote from Alfred.
Since one of his commenters added a much-appreciated tweak to the workflow, I thought I’d do my runthrough for how I set it up using Stephen’s instructions.
Get Alfred
Alfred is a free application, but in order to do what we are going to be going to be doing here, I believe that you will need to purchase the Powerpack. At the time of writing, it is 12 GBP.
The Powerpack does way more than what we’ll be talking about here, and if you want to use Alfred for doing more than just launching files, I highly recommend it.
Get the Evernote Extension
In Stephen’s second blog post, he provides an Alfred Evernote extension that you can download. However, I recommend the modification that Thought Asylum reader Pontus Sundén put together. You can download Pontus’ extension here.
Pontus’ modification works the same, but the search results appear in the existing Evernote window and do not pop up a new one. I personally prefer having everything in one window, but go whichever way makes the most sense to you.
Download either extension to your computer and remember where you saved it, because you’ll need it in the next step. In my example, I will save it to my desktop.
Add The Extension To Alfred
To add the extension to Alfred, first go into Preferences by clicking on the Alfred icon in your menu bar and choosing Preferences.
From there, click on the Extensions tab.
Drag the extension file that you downloaded previously on to the Alfred window like this.
Give the extension a name if you want it to be something other than “Search Evernote”. Then hit Import.
From there, a window will pop up that might look a bit scary, but don’t worry. You don’t need to think about 99% of it, if any at all.
First, on the left hand side, you will now notice that under Applescripts you will have Search Evernote added. That’s great, it means that it imported.
Next, you will see the Keyword field. You can change this if you want. That is what tells Alfred that you want to kick off an Evernote search. We’ll show how this works soon, but in the meantime you can either leave it as just en (Pontus’ default), or change it to something else. Stephen’s default was $en, so do what you want here.
When you are done, you are good to go. It is time to close the Preferences window and try searching!
Search Evernote From Alfred
When I type the Alfred keystroke to start a search[2], the search box will pop up. First, I type the little keyword code that we set in the previous section, which in my case is just en.
You can see that it brings up a few things, but in my case, all I care about is the first entry which is the Search Evernote option that we had created. Yeah! It shows up!
When I hit Space, it will know that I want to use the first option, so after that, anything I type will be sent directly to Evernote for searching.
Let’s try a simple Evernote search for a tag.
When I hit Enter, it starts up my Evernote client (I didn’t have it running), and does a search for anything with the tag cocktail in my Evernote account.
Let’s say I wanted to search for the instruction manual for my garage storage shelves, and I remembered I had bought it at Costco.
Et voila…
As far as I have found, you can type pretty much any Evernote search term into Alfred and it will carry over.
I’ve found integrating Evernote searching into Alfred to be super-helpful. Thanks to Stephen and Pontus for their great extensions and instructions.
Do you have any other great Alfred (or other application launcher) tricks for going paperless? I’d love to hear them in the comments.
