Is there a way to open up Hazel with a hotkey?

I am thinking of a way where I can activate Hazel preferences with a hotkey.

I tried making that hotkey with BetterTouchTool but since it's a preference pane app and not an app in applications folder, I couldn't figure out a way how to do that.

Did anyone figure out how to open up hazel with a hotkey? I think it should be added as a feature to the app and I hope it could be added.

Thank you for any help.

Can I ask why you need to do this? It would help guide whether it is something I implement or not.

The only real reason, is user experience. I want to be able to quickly open up the Hazel preferences pane. Right now I open it up with Alfred and it's quite fast but a hotkey would be really nice. I plan to use Hazel often and my workflow is very reliant on hotkeys and keyboard, I think it would really be great if there was a hotkey, it would just speed up the workflow.

Thank you and I hope you can understand what I mean.

Well, my question is more why you need to bring up Hazel quickly and that often. Could you describe your workflow to me that involves using Hazel this way?

Also, it might be doable with Keyboard Maestro. I don't use it myself but I think I've heard of other people having success with it.

It's not a must have feature, it just saves time opening up Hazel preferences if I want to quickly add or edit a rule. It's faster to open it up with a hotkey, then open up Alfred / Spotlight and type in 'haze' and press enter.

I can understand that the complexity of adding a hotkey to open it up might not be worth the time but I still think it would be nice to have. I hope I am not the only person who thinks this way.

nikivi wrote:It's not a must have feature, it just saves time opening up Hazel preferences if I want to quickly add or edit a rule. It's faster to open it up with a hotkey, then open up Alfred / Spotlight and type in 'haze' and press enter.

I can understand that the complexity of adding a hotkey to open it up might not be worth the time but I still think it would be nice to have. I hope I am not the only person who thinks this way.

You're not the only one. It would actually be nice to have hotkeys for opening everything but I imagine complexity isn't the only hindrance to this feature but also the hardware limitations. Maybe if there's enough people will ask for the feature then maybe just maybe.

It's not necessarily technical limitations so much as when adding a feature, it needs to be justified. Actual use cases go a long way towards this. Many times, people ask for a solution without stating the problem which leads to wasted effort and time. I would say a majority of the time, the problem can be solved with a better solution or it already is solved with existing features. But until the underlying problem to be solved is identified, I find it's not productive discussing the solution.

Wouldn't it be more appropriate for the hotkey link to be created through a new workflow with a hotkey as a trigger? Seeing as how Alfred is an app launcher, and that it readily accesses preference panes, it stands to reason that the hotkey assignment should begin there.

You can do that within Alfred (or Keyboard Maestro). The Hazel.prefPane is located here:

~/Library/PreferencePanes/

So, simply create a Hotkey Trigger in Alfred, followed by a Launch Files / Apps action:

Edit: Keyboard Maestro have an 'Open a System Preference Pane' action. Easy!

Use Keyboard Maestro action-open a system preference pane,choose Hazel,assign a hot key.