My first Launchbar license is from 2008 I believe. Since them I’ve tried almost every other launcher (and that includes Alfred’s Powerpack, and the shiny Raycast) but I keep getting back to Launchbar. I guess there is some kind of Emacs-like muscle memory to it.
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Do any LaunchBar users here have a working chrome history? I haven’t had one for over a year. Support has not been a responsive. This is on Catalina through Monterey. It’s my only pain point with the otherwise excellent application.
Mmmmm, just checked and no, it does not seem to work!
I may have never understood LaunchBar’s Instant Send feature. But isn’t that what Alfred’s Universal Actions were going after?
I never got used to Alfred though I am sure it is a good app. I uninstalled it and put a Keyboard Maestro palette there instead, it does all I need along with the Keyboard Maestro clipboard. I could be tempted by Launchbar again but the way it was abandoned left me skeptical.
It could well be that the devs think of their product as “mostly finished” so the update pace is glacial, like Cultured Code’s Things.
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Instant Send was the feature that I missed the most when I moved from LaunchBar to Alfred. I was happy to see the recent introduction of Universal Actions. They provide essentially the same functionality as Instant Send.
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Ha ha, I went the opposite way and moved my Keyboard Maestro clipboard and snippets macros to Alfred when I discovered how great an app it was.
But I replaced my use of the TextSoap app with a Keyboard Maestro conflict palette. And I have I kept my remaining macros in Keyboard Maestro because I’m much more comfortable creating macros in KM than in using Alfred’s Workflows.
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It was workflows that defeated me in Alfred. I thought it a great app. I am at the stage now where I don’t want to spend time learning an app. That is a huge change from where I was a couple of years ago when that was, in itself, a pleasure. I am still learning on DEVONthink 3, Keyboard Maestro and Ulysses even and enough is enough: I don’t really have any tech bottlenecks on what I do beyond refining those apps.
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There’s definitely a learning curve with Alfred’s workflows, but worth it, I think. The worst is when after setting and forgetting it for months, when I go back to tweak something or make a new one, I have to review once again how to do it. It gets easier each time, of course.
Still, if I had to choose one, it would be LaunchBar. I’ve worried in the past that it looks abandoned, but they push out updates for every new version of the OS, so I’m now keeping faith that I’ll have LaunchBar for the long term even it it doesn’t get any significant new features. I mean, why fix something that ain’t broke anyways.
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I’m fairly programming-literate with Swift in Xcode, Javascript in Google Docs, AppleScript, Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, VBA in Excel to name some.
I have no idea how to write a workflow in Alfred, frustrating me no end.
Maybe I should read some instructions, but they have remained impenetrable to my tinkering.
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I simply copied existing workflows and tweaked from there.
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Good point, thank you, I forgot that I have done that a couple of times and it’s a great technique to use; it’s starting from scratch (even to do something similar to something I found) that befuddles me for whatever reason.
Disclaimer: I only trialed LaunchBar years ago shortly and am not familiar with its features. That said, there is a powerful Alfred workflow on GitHub as well:
I don’t know how this compares with the DEVONthink integration for LaunchBar, but it’s very feature rich and I use it extensively. Just putting it out here in case anyone would find it useful.
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Thanks on the basis of this I tried Launchbar again, it seems fine without the glitches I had before, so thanks for the head’s up, you really are a Saint 
I realized I had missed the features I used a lot, though Keyboard Maestro was a real alternative. the ‘send’ feature was familiar and I was really used to it. I have to say I will stick with what I said before though until I am quite sure it works properly. It seems to do what I want. It doesn’t play well with DEVONthink 3 but I think that is asking a lot of it and I tend to keep DEVONthink 3 ringfenced to some extent and just use its own powers,. I search it with houdah spot which comes up quick with Launchbar in fairness and tend to move stuff into it directly when I need to from other parts of my computer. Launchbar does seem to recognize DEVONthink 3 ‘Inbox’ which, meh, I don’t use that a lot these days as I like to put things straight into where they belong. I think the app has been ‘mended’ though in fairness.
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Just in passing, I like it when some apps stay where they are. I would prefer if Ulysses for example didn’t add anything extra. I don’t need any of it and there is usually something I need to learn or ignore or tweak. My complaint is not the there are no new features. I didn’t need any on Launchbar, but that parts of it seemed broken to me. Just didn’t work right and that is no good for a keystone app like it is… make sense?
This thread was the first time I heard of Universal Actions, which does seem like a great new feature on a par with LaunchBar’s instant send. But when I go to do my most common action, Send via Air Drop, I get no effect. Double-clicking option, then typing “sen” brings up the item, but when I hit return, there’s no effect. Alfred does have Full Disk Access in my Security & Privacy.
Alfred has increasingly become my favorite utility. I have been using it as a launcher for a few years now but I find it subsuming more of more functions.
About a year ago I moved my clipboard management from another app to Alfred and have been much happier.
I gave up my text-expander subscription about 9 months ago in favor of Alfred snippets. I lost a little functionality but I like the organization better.
More recently I have given up another favorite, Popclip, in favor of Universal Actions. I was able to write some simple workflows to implement all of the functions that I used regularly in Popclip.
I do agree that workflows in Alfred are somewhat opaque. I haven’t tried “hard” to learn about them, but I am used to “intuiting” things and I haven’t been able to intuit anything but the simplest workflows. Thankfully that’s all I’ve needed thus far.
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I’m okay not using Alfred workflows. I love everything else about Alfred. But I’ve had Keyboard Maestro for years and am comfortable with it and happy to keep it updated for my collection of (procedural, workflow-y) macros.
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Me too exactly regarding Alfred and Launchbar, I really think that is optimal.