I spend too much time searching for stuff in Omnifocus. Whilst I can use ⌘-O to search for projects and folders within Omnifocus itself, searching for tasks is not so easy. I can’t quickly search using the search field because OmniFocus restricts the results to the current perspective or selection.

As a workaround, I’ve written a workflow that allows you to search for tasks and projects directly from Alfred. It allows you to:

• Search for all tasks within OmniFocus (irrespective of status) with the keyword .s
• Search the OmniFocus inbox with .i
• List everything in the Inbox with .li
• Search just for active tasks with .sa
• Search for projects with .p

Selecting one of the results Alfred shows should display that task or project in Omnifocus (assuming your View options are set to show them).

Download

You can download the workflow from GitHub or from Packal (although, at the time of writing, Packal is showing an out of date version).

Notes

• Thanks to Seth Clifford for the useful feedback.
• Dean Jackson’s Python library for Alfred workflows does most of the heavy lifting. Excellent stuff, thank you.
• Marko Kaestner’s more in-depth workflow provided some insight into how to search Omnifocus.
• There is 1 outstanding issue with this workflow: 1 character queries aren’t invoked by Alfred and can result in stale python processes. I’m looking into it.