pipe transformation workflow for Alfred

An Alfred workflow enabling easy transformation of the current contents of the clipboard by piping through arbitrary shell one-liners.

Requirements

• Alfred (version 2.0+)
• The Alfred Powerpack.
• Python 3 (xcode-select --install or Homebrew)

Usage

Trigger the workflow by hotkey or keyword (default=|, override with the keyword variable) followed by an arbitrarily simple or complex shell one-liner to transform the contents of the clipboard in-place; optionally use the Cmd-modifier to immediately paste the results into the foreground app, or the Alt-modifier to show the results in large type.

Two hotkeys are configurable:

• transform the current contents of the clipboard (like the keyword); recommended hotkey: Ctrl-Cmd-
• transform the current selection in the foreground app; recommended hotkey: Ctrl-Cmd-C

When triggered via hotkey, the leading keyword (e.g. |) is not required.

Examples

• Transform to UPPERCASE: | perl -nle 'print uc' or | tr a-z A-Z
• Base64 encode: | base64
• Base64 decode: | base64 --decode
• Top 10 unique lines with counts: | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10

Built-ins

A number of example pipelines (including those above) are built-in.

Built-ins can be disabled en-mass by setting the load_builtins variable to any value other than yes.

Aliases

To save repetitive typing, custom aliases can be defined with the following syntax:

| alias NAME=PIPE | LINE @@@

The trailing @@@ (override with the alias_terminator variable) terminates the alias definition and causes it to be saved.

Examples

• | alias tac=sed '1!G;h;$!d' @@@
• | alias top10=sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10 @@@

Alias removal

Any custom alias can be removed with:

| alias NAME=@@@

Contributions & Thanks

• ctwise