willbchang / alfred-search-selection

One hotkey: Search selected text/image, open url(s) from selected text.

_{Dedicated to my friend @Y4m1n for her 24th birthday.}

Search Selection

An Alfred workflow to do daily searches(text, image and open urls in text) with one hotkey.

Installation

1. Download Search Selection.alfredworkflow
2. Double click Search Selection.alfredworkflow to install.
3. Click Import Button.
4. Double click Hotkey and set your shortcut.(I'm using alt + s).

Features & Usages

alt+s

• Open url(s):

  Select this line and press hotkey, it will open willbc.cn and https://news.ycombinator.com/ in the browser. 
  

  
• Text Search:
  • Search this lines and press the hotkey.
  • Search these two lines and press the hotkey.
• Image Search: Select a local image or browse in Alfred File Search and press hotkey, please wait for seconds.

Change Search Engine

Default: Google

1. Search test with your favorite search engine.
2. Get the url from the results, e.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=
3. Open Alfred Preferences -> Workflows -> Search Selection
4. Right click Open in Editor workflow -> Open in Finder
5. Open script.rb, press Command + F to find text.
6. Replace https://google.com/search?q= with your favorite search engine url.

Contribution

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

The code logic is very simple:

if File.exist?(filepath)
  if File.image?(filepath)
    search_image(filepath)
  else
    push_notification('Please select an image', 'Supports jpg, gif, png, bmp, tif, or webp')
  end
elsif extract_urls(query).any?
  open_urls(query)
else
  search_text(query)
end

Credits

• Images are uploaded to https://sm.ms/
• Image search was inspired by https://github.com/BlackwinMin/alfred-gallery/tree/master/img%20Search
• It was built with RubyMine which helped me improve the code quality a lot.
• Icons made by https://www.flaticon.com/authors/roundicons

I tried write it with Python, it was not simple at all, I had to deal with some package/language issues. Pain!
I tried write it with Shell, all I did was trying to figure out the syntax. Deep Pain!
I tried write it with Go, well I never get started. Lost...
I tried Ruby(with little Shell code inside), it just worked without much pain! 💖 I really enjoyed it!

License

AGPL-3.0