Alfred Bear Workflow

This workflow should help to use templates in combination with the bear app.

Installation

npm install --global alfred-bear

Usage

While creating note templates with static content can be useful, having the possibility to use dynamic placeholder from any source I want is really great. That's why I built this workflow.

To get an idea how this work, take a look at template examples: the Daily Log or Jira Ticket.

Configuration

This workflow requires an index.yml file which contains a list and configuration of your templates.

The default workflow configuration directory is ~/.bear-templates and can be changed by setting the bearTemplateIndex variable in the workflow settings. The template directory can be synced e.g. with a .dotfiles repository, Dropbox, etc.

This directory should contain a template index file (default: index.yml) and your templates.

An example directory structure:

├──~/.bear-templates
│    ├── index.yml
│    ├── weekly-review
│    │   ├── template.md
│    │   └──script.js
│    ├── jira-ticket
│    │   ├── ticket.md
│    │   ├── ticket.js
│    │   ├── package.json
│    │   ├── node_modules
│    │   ├── diary.md

To create the index.yml in the expected default directory:

mkdir ~/.bear-templates/
touch ~/.bear-templates/index.yml

The index.yml

An example of index.yml content:

templates:
  - title: "Daily Log"
    file: "alfred-bear-daily-log/Daily Log.md"
    script: "alfred-bear-daily-log/script.js"
    newWindow: false
    var:
      DATE_FORMAT: "YYYY-MM-DD"

  - title: "Jira Ticket"
    file: "alfred-bear-jira-ticket/Jira Ticket.md"
    ...

title

The title is shown in the template list:

file

Path to the template markdown file. This file can contain 2 different styles of placeholder.

Normal Alfred Dynamic Placeholder
Placeholders with double curly braces {{myPlaceholder}} which follow the Handlebars syntax. These Placeholders could come from the script, var or question option.

First the handlebars placeholders are replaced in the template and in the second step the dynamic placeholders from alfred.

script [optional]

Path to a node.js module file. This module has to export a [optional async] function which returns an object, whose properties are placeholder keys.

To use other npm modules in this script, the script has to be a node module by itself. This means that templates can easily be shared as npm packages or repositories.

// script.js
const rp = require("request-promise");

/**
 * [Async] function which gets the static variables
 * from the var option and the answer from
 * the optional question.
 */
async function greet(variables) {
  const data = await rp(variables.myRestApiEndpoint);
  return {
    myText: data.body,
  };
}

module.exports = greet;

newWindow [optional]

Should the new note opened in a separate window?

var [optional]

List of static placeholders for the template (e.g. APIToken, BaseUrl for REST Call etc.)

question [optional]

Sets a question to the workflow which asks for an additional placeholder value. To use the answer of this question in the template or script the placeholder key is {{answer}}.

Example templates

If someone built a nice basis for a template, feel free to add it to this list and make a PR.

Development

To run and debug the project locally clone it then:

npm install
npm install -g
npm run dev

Workflow will be installed in alfred and symlinked to local files. Project will be rebuilt on every file change by the tsc watcher.