Alfred + .Rproj

Productivity RStudio

How to configure Alfred to search for .Rproj files

Author

Affiliation

Seb Dalgarno

 

Published

April 14, 2021

Citation

Dalgarno, 2021

TL;DR add dyn.ah62d4rv4ge81e6dwr7za to Preferences -> Features -> Default Results -> Advanced... panel to add .Rproj as a user-defined file type.

Overview

Alfred app is a productivity app (in their words) for MacOS

Sorry Windows users. But there are other apps for Windows that do similar things.
1 that does many many things. So far, I’ve just been using it’s search functionality and am finding it quite sweet indeed (think Spotlight, but better). The use case here is that I want to avoid using my mouse to search for various Rstudio .Rproj files (i.e. in Finder).

Hadley is god

I first came across this tip from Hadley Wickham in this video - so you know it’s good.

Installing Alfred

Install Alfred from the website or with homebrew on the command line:

brew install --cask alfred

Configuring Alfred for .Rproj

Open Alfred and get into Preferences -> Features -> Default Results panel.

Alfred1

Click on Advanced... and add the following user-defined file type (by clicking +)

dyn.ah62d4rv4ge81e6dwr7za
Alfred1

Keyboard shortcut

I like to open Alfred with the keyboard shortcut Cmd-space instead of Spotlight. I followed the instructions here to do this.

Done! Now open Alfred with Cmd-space and start typing in the name of a .Rproj file. Note you can add other file types for Alfred to look for (e.g. Scrivener projects). A final tip is that if you press space before typing the file name, Alfred will search all files.

If you are looking for more Mac productivity tips, check out this awesome Twitter thread

Footnotes

  1. Sorry Windows users. But there are other apps for Windows that do similar things.[↩]

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Dalgarno (2021, April 14). Fishy Data Blog: Alfred + .Rproj. Retrieved from https://fishydata.netlify.app/posts/2021-04-14-alfred/

BibTeX citation

@misc{dalgarno2021alfred,
  author = {Dalgarno, Seb},
  title = {Fishy Data Blog: Alfred + .Rproj},
  url = {https://fishydata.netlify.app/posts/2021-04-14-alfred/},
  year = {2021}
}