Setting up Alfred with Growl
I had several people ask yesterday about how I set up Alfred to use Growl notifications so I thought I would document it here for now. I know some of you may be asking why you would need Growl with Alfred. I primarily thought it would be nice to have some form of visual feedback from the silent terminal commands that I had set up in Alfred.
Anyway, on with the setup.
Step #1
Go to the Growl site and download the latest version of Growl. The reason you need this is to get growlnotify. Growlnotify allows you to create growl notifications from the command line. Mount the downloaded disk image, go to the Extra folder in the image, and install growlnotify.
Step #2
Create your terminal commands, and call growlnotify at the end.
Example:
Show Hidden Files
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true; killall Finder; /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -a “Alfred” -m “Now showing all files” -t “Alfred”
Result:
Don’t forget to separate your commands with a ;
With the current version of Alfred, silent terminal commands require you to use absolute path to files and applications, that’s why you have to specify the abs path to growlnotify. The first parameter (-a) is the application icon to use. The second parameter (-m) is the message to display. The last parameter (-t) is the title of the notification.
Other applications
I set this up originally to use with Twitter when tweeting from within Alfred. To set this up, I followed the setup found at Davis Cabral’s blog.
This could also be set up with fbcmd. Fbcmd lets you interact with Facebook via command line. Therefore, you can post to Facebook via Alfred.
