Feature Request: Sort Folders

I love Hazel.

I have tons of rules for tons of folders. 45 folders, actually, with probably 1-10 rules each.

The biggest frustration I regularly face with Hazel is trying to find the folder for which I want to modify a rule. I usually know the name of the folder I'm looking for, but the problem is that the folders appear in some crazy order (probably the order I added them to Hazel's watch list?), and I have to scroll up and down until I finally find the folder I'm looking for.

Can we please have some kind sorting for the "Folders" pane? Or even a spotlight style search / filter box would work, if that's any easier. I wouldn't know, but seems like it would be reasonably simple to implement.

Thanks for all your hard work on a great product!

This is the kind of situation I envisaged getting into when I posted my question in viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3489. Being a very new user I have now made a “list” of what is where. I have done this in the format of a Scapple document which gives me a nice pictorial overview. (I would post a screenshot but can not figure out how to upload an image with a posting).

Can you describe why you have so many folders? Are they under a common folder and/or do they all have the same or similar rules?

I have tons of folders because I started using Hazel within months of getting my first Mac, and I've grown to use it more and more as I've grown to learn my Mac.

Several are under a common folder ("Launch" -- my base folder for most scripting and automation), but many are not. Some of them have similar rules, but many do not. Many have only 1 or 2 rules per folder, but a few have 10 or 15.

Launch: 18 rules. Most of these launch apps based on the names of empty text files that I upload from my phone (which I wrote about years ago here). Others automatically start torrent files (also so I can upload them while on the go), and one I think is particularly clever gives me a push notification when Comcast fixes my internet (since it goes out often enough).

One folder monitors OmniFocus and automates logging my completed tasks. Several others monitor my various plaintext apps' folders and automate processing / moving / renaming / archiving text files. A few others automatically prefix filenames with the date they were added to a folder for easy sorting. Others process screenshots or monitor my ~/Downloads folder to open files in their respective apps.

Another monitors a folder I used with an OpenMeta tagging app and automates pulling those files and their tags into Evernote (using a script I think I found here). Some process files that are downloaded from emails to Dropbox by IFTTT, or run scripts to automatically post content to various sites using Python and/or AppleScript. I have a script that runs whenever I connect my Kindle and processes my Kindle Highlights into a format I like in order to more easily post them as "favorite quotes" to my site.

If you can't tell, I really use Hazel for quite a bit, and I think it's an awesome tool. I'm not sure if I'm just a big outlier, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are others using Hazel to monitor more than just 4 or 5 folders, and who would benefit from some kind of sort or search feature.

At least for certain rules, like the app launching one, you can write a script to do that part which would condense the list a bit.

Also, do these things need to be in separate folders? Can you combine folders and have a longer rule list?

Well it would be trivial to write a single rule that would match a filename and execute a script, which could eliminate the number of rules per folder (though that's not my main issue).

The reason I have to have so many folders is in large part due to limitations of other apps. E.g. as a security precaution, Dropbox can grant "folder-only" access to numerous iOS apps, which means they have to store their data in a specific, separate folder. Several of my OSX-relevant rules are similar; they watch a given app's Application Support/ or Cache/ directory.

Additionally, many of the other folders are kept separate for my sanity. Their rules filter dozens or hundreds of files for specific filetype changes; combining those folders would make it an absolute mess for me to navigate manually (due to how many files would be stored in a single folder).

Based on your responses, it sounds like adding a folder sort button would be a much bigger deal than I thought.

Mr_Noodle wrote:At least for certain rules, like the app launching one, you can write a script to do that part which would condense the list a bit.

Also, do these things need to be in separate folders? Can you combine folders and have a longer rule list?