Set Color Labels from Alfred and Terminal
I’m getting more into using Color Labels for my work. Since I think labeling should be possible from anywhere I searched for a way to add Labels from the command line and Alfred as well.
Alfred
Alfred is quite an easy task. A couple new extensions, plus some icons that can be called from the Actions do the job quite well.
I made one extension for every color and one to remove the label. The extensions can “toggle” (label/unlabel) the color as well.
on alfred_script(q)
set q to (POSIX file q) as alias
tell application "Finder"
if label index of q = 0 then
set label index of q to 4
else
set label index of q to 0
end if
end tell
end alfred_script
Download: https://www.box.com/s/av7vj4ob6joeufr4a0y3
Command Line
The command line option is a bit trickier, because OS X doesn’t have a CLI utility to set color labels directly. A neat script added to your .profile should do the trick though. I made some changes, since I don’t like typing label 4 file.txt to label an item. label yellow file.txt seems more naturaly, isn’t it?
Note that you can remove a color label by typing “remove”, “none” or “blank”, e.g. label none file.txt or label remove file.txt.
# Set Finder label color
label(){
if [ $# -lt 2 ]; then
echo "USAGE: label [0-7] file1 [file2] ..."
echo "Sets the Finder label (color) for files"
echo "Default colors:"
echo " 0 No color"
echo " 1 Orange"
echo " 2 Red"
echo " 3 Yellow"
echo " 4 Blue"
echo " 5 Purple"
echo " 6 Green"
echo " 7 Gray"
else
osascript - "$@" << EOF
on run argv
set labelIndex to (item 1 of argv as number)
repeat with i from 2 to (count of argv)
tell application "Finder"
set theFile to POSIX file (item i of argv) as alias
set label index of theFile to labelIndex
end tell
end repeat
end run
EOF
fi
}