A Fantastical plugin for Alfred

I wrote a new plugin. It’s a Fantastical plugin for the excellent Spotlight replacement app Alfred.

I use Fantastical every day to quickly input new appointments. Its natural language parser is the best and quickest way to enter calendar data. I had Fantastical set to ⌥ Space because I would use it so frequently.

But I also use and love Alfred, the super powerful Spotlight replacement from Running with Crayons. I use it to do everything from opening files and composing mails to performing quick web searches. It replaces Spotlight’s ⌘ Space shortcut for me. I love to write short workflows¹ to perform frequent tasks via Alfred.

I wanted to unify Alfred and Fantastical and save one keyboard shortcut in the process.

Luckily, Flexibits included Applescript support into Fantastical, so creating a simple workflow was trivial:

on alfred_script(q)
    tell application "Fantastical" to parse sentence q
end alfred_script

Given this code, Alfred would pass whatever argument I gave after my Keyword (I decided on cal) to Fantastical, and then I would press enter to create the entry.² It is not very sophisticated and imartins created a similar plugin way before me.

There was one annoyance, though. I often use Fantastical to view upcoming appointments. When you invoke Fantastical via parse sentence it always expands the parsing area, cropping the events list. The workaround was to enter some text and delete it again, then the parsing interface would collapse. Because this is annoying to do I decided to automate this:³

on alfred_script(q)
    if q is "" then
        set q to " "
    end if

    tell application "Fantastical" to parse sentence q

    if q is " " then
        tell application "System Events" to key code 51
    end if
end alfred_script

This code checks if the input string is empty. If it is, it turns it into a singe space character to be easily deleted later. After the parse command I simulate the key press of key code 51, which is the delete key. This collapses the parsing interface.

It has a .5 second delay, but it works for me. If I enter cal into Alfred, it opens the normal Fantastical interface (like if I pressed ⌥ Space before). If I enter cal with anything afterwards, Fantastical uses this text to parse a new entry.