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 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 alfredConfiguring Alfred for .Rproj
Open Alfred and get into Preferences -> Features -> Default Results panel.
Click on Advanced... and add the following user-defined file type (by clicking +)
dyn.ah62d4rv4ge81e6dwr7za
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
Sorry Windows users. But there are other apps for Windows that do similar things.↩︎