A few years back, I had a productivity conversation with Jay Miller about Alfred plugins, which led to him sharing his Bunch_Alfred plugin. At the time, I played around with the Bunch.app, a macOS automation tool, and Alfred’s support was interesting.

I created my Alfred plugin to run Just command runner commands through my Alfred setup. However, I never got around to packing or writing the plugin’s documentation.

My Alfred plugin runs Script Filter Input, which reads from a centrally located justfile and generates JSON output of all of the possible options. This will be displayed, and Alfred will run that command, whichever option you select.

I was always unhappy with how the JSON document was generated from my commands, so I dusted off the project over lunch and re-engineered it by adding Pydantic support.

Alfred just announced support for a new User Interface called Text View, which could make text and markdown output from Python an exciting way to handle snippets and other productive use cases. I couldn’t quite figure it out over lunch, but now I know it’s possible, and I might figure out how to convert my Justfile Alfred plugin to generate better output.