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Comment by ArlenBales | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big power user of Alfred. I've created a lot of custom workflows in Alfred to automate things in macOS, such as setting up dev environments (window management) or using the Dash workflow integration. The power of Alfred is in its workflows and workflow creator. Alfred + Hammerspoon is particularly nice. (You can execute hotkeys in Alfred that trigger Hammerspoon init.lua bindings)

I can't tell if Zazu is just a replacement for simple app launching, or if it has the ability to do everything Alfred's workflows can do.

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Zazu does allow for keyboard shortcuts, and can do everything the Alfred workflows can, but does not currently provide a GUI for creating the workflows. The biggest difference for the plugins, is that they are written in Node so they can be cross platform.

For more info on creating plugins: http://zazuapp.org/documentation/plugins/

Thanks. The workflow creator GUI is the big seller for Alfred, it saves a lot of time in testing and tweaking workflows and from having to write a bunch of boilerplate.

Completely agree, and I can't wait to have one for Zazu! :D

I'm a big user of Alfred, and I installed Hammerspoon a while back, but I have yet to actually do a single thing with Hammerspoon. I'm curious if you can provide any examples of what you use Hammerspoon for.

I use it to setup dev environments' windows. For example, a hotkey that launches the following configuration automatically in about 14 seconds (this is my primary coding setup).

1. 3 terminals and 1 Finder each in a quadrant on Space 1

2. Two Chrome windows, full-screened and placed into split-view next to each other (split view is when you hold down the minimize button for a bit to put two full-screen apps next to each other)

3. Sublime Text 3, full-screened.

4. Dash (doc app) full-screened and placed split-view with another full-screened Chrome window.

Basically automates the windows I would setup manually every time I reboot and want to code.

Over in Windows land, I used AutoHotkey for years for all sorts of things, so Hammerspoon is comfortable for me.

Is there any information on how you can run hammer spoon lua bindings from Alfred? I always wanted to call specific functions from hammer spoon from applescript or something but have no idea how you could do that.

In the workflow creator, under "Outputs" is "Dispatch Key Combo Output". Give it the same hotkeys as the binding uses in init.lua. https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/outputs/dispatch-ke...

Edit - If you're looking to do it through AppleScript, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3690167/how-can-one-invok...

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