MacOS – Can Launchbar tag files

An update for LaunchBar 6

Version 6.0 introduced a slick way of selecting multiple items. The LaunchBar folks call it the “Sixth Sense”. Selected items are held in a “staging area” and can be acted upon all at once using typical LaunchBar tools.

• Typing Command-A will select all items in the search list.
• Typing a Comma (“,”) will select the current item and allow you to move on to select more.
• Pressing Shift will scrolling up or down with the arrow keys select continuously as you scroll
• You can undo these actions by repeating them with a selected file. Hitting Escape clears the selections.
  

The selection then works with other actions: Press Tab to send them to another folder, etc.

There’s a discussion at the LaunchBar blog

The open() handler gets passed an alias (which is a kind of a pointer to a file or folder). You can then simply convert the alias to text, but it will show you the path with colons as separators (e.g. "Macintosh HD:Users:Username:Documents:Folder:").

Use POSIX path of to convert it to a UNIX-style path with "/" separators, and if you want to paste it into Terminal, especially if the path has spaces in it, you should use quoted form of to properly enclose it in quotes.

The following script works with both folders and files for me, when an item is passed to it via LaunchBar:

on open (thisItem)
    display dialog (thisItem as text) -- alias
    display dialog quoted form of POSIX path of thisItem -- POSIX path
end open