As promised, since I’ve added the auto-updates to Bunch I’ve laid off on posting with every release. But there’s enough cool new stuff now that I figured I’d share.

I’m still toying with the idea of making this a commercial application, but for now it remains donationware. So don’t be shy.

Since the last post, I’ve added a… bunch of new features. One feature of note that will definitely slip under the radar is that Bunch now watches your Bunches folder and automatically detects changes to your Bunches, refreshing them in memory every time they’re edited. No more “Refresh Bunches” command neccessary when experimenting.

New Commands

I added a few new commands to Bunch. These are lines in parenthesis which control a few macOS functions. Previously I only had commands for hiding and showing the dock set up.

Now there are commands for hiding and showing desktop icons: (hide desktop) and (show desktop).

And commands for toggling Do Not Disturb: (do not disturb) and (do not disturb off). These can be abbreviated as (dnd on) and (dnd off).

New Actions

I’ll describe these briefly, but see the documentation for more details.

You can now execute Automator Workflows by using & at the beginning of a line. If the workflow is in your Bunches folder (or a subfolder), you don’t even need a path or an extension for it (except for relative paths to subfolders), just a line like & MyWorkflow or & workflows/MyWorkflow. You can even pass variables to it, so you can re-use the same workflow in multiple Bunches with different inputs.

You can also execute shell scripts and shell commands directly by using $ at the beginning of a line. These are executed as the equivalent of /bin/sh -c [your command]. You can pass arguments on the same line, or use - filename lines below it to set environment variables. More details in the docs.

You can also now add a percent sign (%) before an app name to ignore it when quitting a Bunch. So if you have an app you want to make sure gets launched with a Bunch, but don’t want it to quit when toggling a Bunch off, just add % at the beginning of the line.

URL Handler Improvements

The URL handler has expanded to include close and toggle methods, as well as a raw method that lets you point to Bunches outside of the Bunch folder and even execute raw text as if it were a bunch. The open, close, and toggle URL handler methods will also now appropriately change the state of Bunches in the menu if you have Toggle Bunches or Single Bunch Mode enabled.

Better Feedback

I’ve added a few alert dialogs to let you know when and why a Bunch item might be failing. Because Bunch is potentially interacting with a dozen other apps and handlers, it’s a bit hard to know exactly where failure points are when executing them in batch. A little feedback where possible should help.

Integrations

You can now find LaunchBar, Alfred, and CLI scripts, as well as updated documentation and download on the project page. And I probably don’t need to say it again (because if you’re going to you will), but if you’re loving Bunch, please pitch in a few bucks!