Alfred Workflow to open a directory in Sublime Text

I’ve recently switched to development in two Vagrant virtual machines (VMs), one VM running Nginx and one running Apache. This means that are two locations I might need to open files from, with two sets of directories representing the document roots of my various development sites. Eventually I got bored of using the terminal to “subl ~/Vagrants/nginx/www/wordpress-whatever/” and decided to write an Alfred Workflow. Now I just trigger Alfred, hit “v client“, and Alfred shows me all my projects in directories with “client” in the name.

The core of the workflow is a script filter which contains the following Bashscript bound to the v keyword. I’ve commented the code fairly well, so hopefully it makes sense; or you can simply download the whole Workflow.

The structure of the workflow looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# We could do this in any script type, but I'm using Bash

# My two Vagrant locations for sites are as follows
# This code reads the immediate child directories into a Bash array
NGINX_FILES=($(find /Users/simonwheatley/Vagrants/ubuntu-precise-32-nginx -iname *{query}* -type d -maxdepth 2));
APACHE_FILES=($(find /Users/simonwheatley/Vagrants/ubuntu-precise-32-apache -iname *{query}* -type d -maxdepth 2));

# Concatenate the Nginx and Apache arrays
FILES=("${NGINX_FILES[@]}" "${APACHE_FILES[@]}");
 
# get length of an array
LENGTH=${#FILES[@]};

# We have to return the results as XML in a certain format
# http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/5-generating-feedback-in-workflows/
echo '<?xml version="1.0"?><items>';

# use for loop read all filenames
for (( I=0; I<${LENGTH}; I++ ));
do
	# Use Bash string manipulation to get the directory name
	# http://stackoverflow.com/a/2664746
	DIR =${FILES[$I]##*/};
	# Work out if we're Nginx or Apache, and set the icon appropriately
	# If seems that to detect a substring, we have to run it through Grep. Weird.
	if echo "${FILES[$I]}" | grep -q "apache"; then
		ICON="apache.png";
	else
		ICON="nginx.png";
	fi
	# Each selectable result is an item in the XML	
	echo "<item uid='$I' arg='${FILES[$I]}' type='file'><title>${DIR}</title><subtitle>${FILES[$I]}</subtitle><icon>${ICON}</icon></item>";
done

echo '</items>';

This feeds into a simple one line Bashscript:

subl {query}

Any suggestions or comments?

(Photo: Bowler hat lamps in the jazz corner of Cafe Belgique, © Hornbeam Wildlife Studio)