Tagging causes Hazel to hang

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Tagging causes Hazel to hang Sat Mar 14, 2015 12:11 pm • by andymckinna
I've been trying to recreate a couple of my old tag-based workflows, but every time I try to create a rule to apply tags, Hazel starts beachballing. I've tried leaving it for several hours in case it resolves itself, but with no result.

Even a greatly simplified version of the workflow causes the same hang; for instance:

if all of the following conditions are met:
kind is PDF
Do the following to the matched file or folder:
add tags ()

All tags have been created in the Finder and can be manually applied. Brand new user account, but on the same Mac that I've used these rules before. Other rules seem to be working without issues. OSX 10.10.2 / Hazel 3.3.4

If you've had similar issues before, I'd be very grateful to hear how you resolved them!

Cheers
Andy
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Mon Mar 16, 2015 2:13 pm • by Mr_Noodle
Next time it hangs, launch Activity Monitor and select System Preferences. Do "Sample Process" and send that over. Also, open Console and see if there are any messages from System Preferences there.
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Sat Aug 25, 2018 6:54 pm • by gcoghill
I am having the same issue.

Sample Process output for System Preference when it hangs was just sent.

Perhaps related, but I also get a spinning wheel in the Console preview window (not a spinning beachball cursor) when attempting the view the Hazel.log file. This happens regardless of the tags hanging issue.
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:38 am • by Mr_Noodle
I've already responded in email but for every one else: this appears to be Hazel querying the system on the tags available in the system. It has to use Spotlight to do this which means that it may take a long time, depending on the state of Spotlight at the time. If you wait it out, it should finish and after that, it should be faster (provided you don't quit System Preferences).
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Mon Aug 27, 2018 12:56 pm • by gcoghill
Waiting some extra time did eventually show the tag chooser, and choosing subsequent tags for the same rule's action did indeed work without delay.

However, if I then switched to a different rule for the same folder (without closing System Preferences), the Spinning Beachball returned, as did the extended delay to load the tags.
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Tue Aug 28, 2018 8:42 am • by Mr_Noodle
Ah, it's possible the cache was cleared either by switching rules, or time (I'd have to check that bit of code to know for sure).

How responsive is Spotlight to normal queries? If it's slow in that instance, then it might be worth looking into that.
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Wed Aug 29, 2018 3:32 pm • by gcoghill
No issues with Spotlight.

As far as time, I was switching rules pretty quickly. Set up one rule with the tag action once the tags loaded, then immediately switched to another rule to add a tags action.

Can't recall if I did so for the same folder, or a different one.
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Thu Aug 30, 2018 10:58 am • by Mr_Noodle
Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done on my end about this. Apple refuses to provide an API for me to use to get the list of system tags so I have to resort to Spotlight (among other sources) to get that info. That means at times it may take a long time.
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Wed May 01, 2019 11:55 am • by jd2d
i loveeeee hazel but this makes it impossible for me to use it, because it takes like 15 minutes to let me change a rule. even if i'm not doing anything to change the tags in the rule. it makes me kind of crazy. is there a way to have it not auto-fill tags, so it doesn't have to go through all the tags that already exist, but could still have dynamic tags? or do you have any suggestions on how to handle this? it makes everything so much harder than it should be. (i recognize this is apple's fault, not yours.)
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Re: Tagging causes Hazel to hang Thu May 02, 2019 10:26 am • by Mr_Noodle
The only advice I can give is to make sure your Spotlight index is up to date and not being generated at the time.

In the future, I'll look into possibly loading tags in stages so that the field is usable even if not all the tags are there.
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