Paul Ryley (@pryley on the forums) whipped up an amazing Alfred macro collection for The Archive. – Huuuuge thanks go out to Paul for taking the time to working with The Archive better for Alfred users!

That means you get a ton of macros to remote-control your Zettelkasten in general and The Archive in particular from Alfred. Alfred is a tool for application launching, global hotkeys, text expansion, and macro invocation. The macro stuff means you can bring up Alfred with a shortcut, then select e.g. the “Search The Archive” macro, and type your search term there.

Paul’s macro collection, called a “workflow” in Alfred lingo, comes with these actions:

• Searching Notes is not actually searching with The Archive, but it’s doing a search in your Zettelkasten, and then offers a couple of actions:
  • preview the note
  • insert link to the note
  • open note with an external editor
• Searching Tasks looks for checkbox-style lists - [x] like this
• Searching Tags shows you a list of all used tags in all your notes, and lets you invoke a search for notes from there
• Random Notes shows any note from your Zettelkasten
• Creating Notes uses a form for title and tags, and it supports complex template files
• Importing URLs is a web clipping tool to import articles as notes
• Importing Images puts an image you select via Alfred (e.g. using it as a Spotlight-like file finder) into The Archive’s managed media folder – and provides a link for it right away
• Text Manipulation is like a format menu add-on for The Archive to increase the heading level, for example

There’s a ton to configure if you want to adjust the behavior to your liking.

Paul’s macro collection comes with a comprehensive documentation, including examples and many screenshots. If you run macOS and want to dip your toes into productivity-enhancing tools like Alfred, make sure to check out Paul’s macros!