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Quickly search through menu options of the front-most application - Alfred Workflow

Menu-Bar-Search

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Search through menu options for front-most application - an Alfred Workflow

Based on the implementation of ctwise's Menu Bar Search.

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Usage

Type m in Alfred to list menu bar items for front most application You can filter menu items by name, or do a fuzzy search.

E.g

  • m new tab will match the menu item New Tab
  • m cw will match the menu item Close Window

ℹ️ 👉 Running on macOS Catalina and beyond

If you face issues from Catalina or beyond, in relation to not being able to run the workflow due to security issues (e.g. malicious software checks), have a look at https://github.com/BenziAhamed/Menu-Bar-Search/issues/4 for possible workarounds.

I am aware of this outstanding issue and will fix it.

Settings

You can change the workflow environment variables to fine tune menu listings

  • -show-disabled true/false controls if diabled menu items should be shown (default is false)

  • -no-apple-menu true/false if true, no menus items under the apple menu will be shown (default is true)

  • -max-children number how many sub-menu items to load for each menu item (default is 30)

  • -max-depth number how many nested levels if sub menus should be listed (default is 10)

Change log

  • 1.0 - Initial Release

  • 1.1 - Added Fuzzy Text Matching for Menus

    If you have a menu item New Tab, then typing m nt in Alfred will match New Tab, since n and t matches the first letters of the menu text.

  • 1.1.1 - Changed run behaviour to terminate previous script, this makes the experience slightly more faster

  • 1.2 - Completely native menu clicking, removed reliance on AppleScript

    • 1.2.1 - Performance improvements when generating menus using direct JSON encoding
    • 1.2.2 - More performance improvements while filtering menu items
  • 1.3 - Added -async flag to allow threaded scanning and populating of menus

  • 1.4 - Added -cache setting to enable menu result caching and also set a timeout for cache invalidation

    • 1.4.1 - Invalidate cache (if present) after actioning a menu press
    • 1.4.2 - Slide the cache invalidation window forward in case we get invalidated by a near miss
    • 1.4.3 - Speed improvements to caching, text search and fuzzy matching
    • 1.4.4 - Added -no-apple-menu flag that will skip the apple menu items
    • 1.4.5 - Tuned fuzzy matcher, allows non-continuous anchor token search
  • 1.5 - Faster caching using protocol buffers

    • 1.5.1 - Reduced file creation for cache storage
    • 1.5.2 - Better support for command line apps that create menu bar owning applications
    • 1.5.3 - Protocol buffer everything - microscopic speed improvements, but hey...
    • 1.5.4 - Added various environment variables to fine tune menu listings
    • 1.5.5 - Tweaked ranking of search results for better menu listings
  • 1.6 - Added per app customization via Settings.txt configuration file

  • 1.7 - Universal build for M1 and Intel

  • 1.8 - Fixed the universal build