Release Notes

This is a hotfix for a bug introduced in LaunchBar 6.20 causing some JavaScript-based custom actions to fail.

Improvements

• Using the term “Contact List” instead of “Contact Group” on macOS 13 and later for consistency with the wording used in the Contacts app.
• Improved Quick Look of plain text items in Clipboard History to use a larger font size.
• The activation hotkey now also resets an existing multiple selection.
• Improved Contacts indexing using a newer macOS API.

Bug Fixes

• When invoking a Service of an app via LaunchBar (e.g. the “Look Up in Dictionary” service of the Dictionary app), the corresponding app sometimes did not come to front.
• Indexing of System Settings didn’t include third party setting panes.
• The Contacts index wasn’t updated automatically when changes were made in the Contacts app.
• Opening a postal address in Maps sometimes caused the web browser to be opened.
• The Quick Look preview window sometimes reopened immediately after being closed.
• The result list sometimes still appeared partially empty (at least for a very short moment). This issue has now been completely resolved.
• Fixed missing localization of file paths shown in the index window.
• Fixed a potential crash when indexing shortcuts from Shortcuts app.
• Fixed a potential crash when indexing Sharing Services.

Bug Fix

Sending text to apps via Send-to sometimes still didn’t bring the target app to front on macOS Sonoma (this bug was supposed to be fixed in version 6.19, so this is another attempt to fix it).

System Settings

Indexing and access to System Settings panes have been completely rewritten. It’s now possible to browse and open all System Settings panes directly from LaunchBar, and they are displayed with their respective icons.

Improvements

• Redesigned and modernized lots of icons shown in the result list (contact details, items in the Music Library, and more).
• Info browsing of a folder (with Shift-Right) now also shows the number of items contained in that folder.
• Improved performance when browsing the result list with the up/down arrow keys.

Bug Fixes

• On macOS Sonoma, the result list sometimes appeared partially empty, with the top match item located somewhere near the bottom of the list.
• Showing items in Finder via Command-Return sometimes didn’t bring the Finder window to front on macOS Sonoma.
• Sending text to apps via Send-to sometimes didn’t bring the target app to front on macOS Sonoma.
• In a multiple display setup with an external monitor, LaunchBar sometimes didn’t appear on the preferred screen at app start.
• Some icons were drawn with their shadows heading in the wrong direction (upwards instead of downwards).
• Info browsing of a folder (with Shift-Right) did not allow to further navigate into the folder’s name to split it into words.
• Resizing the LaunchBar window during text input could cause the text to jump slightly vertically to a different location.
• Various other minor bug fixes and improvements.

We’ve identified and fixed an issue that caused occasional delays during input for some users running versions 6.18.3 and 6.18.4.

This version attempts to resolve perfomance issues that some users have reported after installing the previous version 6.18.3.

• Improved “Display in Large Type” for long text that doesn’t fit into a single line.
• Improved category indexing to eliminate duplicates from the result.
• Fixed: Accessing an app’s Recent Documents didn’t work on macOS 14.1.
• Fixed: Indexing of Calendars and Reminders didn’t work on macOS Sonoma.
• Fixed: Finder tags were no longer shown with their colors on macOS Sonoma.
• Several other minor bug fixes and improvements.

• Fixed an issue causing the “Eject All Ejectable Volumes” action to inadvertently also eject hidden volumes from Xcode’s iOS Simulator.
• Fixed the ^ operation in Calculator (for calculating integral powers of a number like 7^2=49), which stopped working in one of the recent macOS versions.
• Fixed a layout issue in the confirmation dialog shown when installing a new custom action.

Fixed a bug causing the theme settings to get reset to Default & Automatic at each restart of the app.

Automatic Theme Switching

• Added automatic switching between a theme’s dark and light appearance based on the current system appearance.
• The desired theme appearance can be chosen in LaunchBar Settings > Appearance.
• In addition to automatic switching it’s still possible to choose a fixed dark or light appearance.
• The desired appearance can also be chosen in the LaunchBar window. Select a theme (either by browsing the Themes indexing rule or by selecting it directly via abbreviation search), then press Right Arrow (or Space) and choose either Automatic, Light or Dark.
• Added dark variants of built-in themes (except for the “Vintage” theme).

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improved appearance of sidebar in index window.
• Improved caching of applications index for better startup performance.
• Improved ranking of system applications when searching via abbreviation search.
• Fixed: Sending files to a shortcut (those created in the macOS Shortcuts app) didn’t work on macOS Ventura. This was caused by a bug in the Shortcuts API on Ventura, which no longer accepts multiple files or folders to be sent to a shortcut. As a consequence it’s currently only possible to send a single file or folder to a shortcut via LaunchBar on Ventura. On macOS Monterey it’s still possible to send multiple files or folders.
• Fixed a bug causing a file path copied from LaunchBar into a Terminal window to be pasted twice.
• Fixed a crash when allowing Calendar/Reminders access after adding or enabling the corresponding indexing rule.
• Fixed an issue causing the shadows in a few custom icons to be headed in the wrong direction.

Improved Shortcuts Support

• If a shortcut accepts files as an input, it’s now possible to send those files to the shortcut via Send-to (select a file in LaunchBar, press Tab, select the shortcut, hit Return).
• Shortcuts are now displayed with the icon that has been defined in Shortcuts.app

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Improved handling of custom script actions which are returning items that are referring to a file.
• Improved Action Editor to preserve custom entries in an action’s Info.plist.
• Updated icons of bookmarks and bookmark folders.
• Fixed indexing of Safari iCloud Tabs.
• Fixed: Accessing contact notes didn’t work on macOS Ventura
• Fixed an issue causing arrow key navigation to fail once, immediately after press Command-Right.

New Features

• Compatibility with macOS Ventura.
• New built-in “Dark Mode On/Off” action.
• New built-in actions for converting images into PNG or HEIC format.

Improvements

• Improved Google Chrome Bookmarks and History indexing to support multiple profiles.
• Improved application indexing to also include Xcode’s Simulator.app.
• Renamed image conversion actions from “Recompress Image” to “Convert Image to JPG”.
• Improved icons of built-in actions.
• Improved appearance of drag & drop highlight while dragging items onto the LaunchBar window.
• Improved browsing of an application’s recent documents to indicate if a document would by default open with a different app.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed indexing of Firefox bookmarks and history.
• Fixed built-in “Set Desktop Background” action.
• Fixed incorrect display of icons with non-square aspect ratios.
• Fixed a layout issue in the Options pane of the index window.

Other Changes

• Changed keyboard shortcut of “Open in Action Editor” from Command-Return to Shift-Command-E.
• Dropped support for Chromium and Opera web browsers.
• Removed “Lock Screen” and Fast User Switching actions on macOS Big Sur and later, because macOS has removed the ability for third party apps to trigger these functions.

New Features

• Added support for shortcuts defined in the Shortcuts.app of macOS Monterey. Those shortcuts are indexed automatically and can be conveniently invoked from LaunchBar. If a shortcut requires text input, this text can be entered after pressing the Space bar or via Send-to.
• Added „Giphy GIFs“ search template to search for GIFs on giphy.com.
• When the Safari History indexing rule is selected in LaunchBar, pressing Command-Return now invokes the new “Show History in Safari” action, which opens the History page in Safari.
• Added a new “iOS Applications” category containing all iOS apps that can be run natively on Apple Silicon Macs.

Appearance

• The overall appearance has been improved and modernized in many areas of the application.
• Dozens of newly designed or refined icons, meticulously fine tuned to be pixel aligned for a super crisp look.
• Most categories now have dedicated icons instead of the generic cardboard box symbol.
• Refined appearance of many UI elements.
• Refined appearance of built-in Themes.
• The text cursor shown during text input is now more pronounced for better visibility.

Improvements

• Improved Instant Open behavior of indexing rules. For example, when you type EM to select the Emoji indexing rule and keep the M key pressed to trigger Instant Open, you now immediately get to the list of all Emoji symbols.
• The Quick Look preview panel is now closed automatically when pressing Tab to invoke Send-to.
• Improved support for 1Password.
• Improved DuckDuckGo action for better compatibility with macOS Monterey.
• Improved item list drawing performance.
• Improved algorithm for determining plural forms used in category names.
• Excluded duplicate Siri.app entry in applications index.
• Script based custom actions that are selected in LaunchBar can now be opened in Action Editor using the new “Show in Action Editor” command from the context menu or by pressing Command-Return.
• Improved layout of index window. The „Add Indexing Rule“ button has been moved to the bottom of the sidebar of the index window.

Bug Fixes

• The “Skip Subfolders” indexing option is now properly considered for file packages when the „Search file package contents“ option is turned on.
• Fixed: The color of Finder tags was no longer shown on macOS Monterey.
• Corrected capitalization of some Emoji names.
• Fixed: After invoking the “Clear Clipboard History” or “Clear Recent Items” actions, Instant Send was wrongly offered.
• The “Mobile Phone” icon was too large in a pop-up menu of the Preferences window.
• Fixed: Some icons were drawn with a shadow heading in the wrong direction.
• Fixed: Thin grid lines in the search result list were not properly updated on selection changes.
• Corrected text color in Usage window (some labels became invisible in Dark Mode due to their white text color).

• Hot Fix: Applications indexing didn’t include iOS apps on Apple Silicon Macs. If you’ve been affected by this bug, please press Option-Command-R in LaunchBar to enforce an index update.

Music

• Added “Add to Playlist” functionality via Send-to. Example: Select a song in LaunchBar, press Tab, select a Playlist, hit Return.
• Music indexing now creates “smart” categories for “Downloaded Songs”, “DRM Protected Songs”,“Unplayed Songs” and “Purchased Songs” making it easy to search for songs of just that kind via sub-search.
• Added “Play in Random Order” action for playlists (accessible from the action menu or opening the playlist with Option-Return).
• Much improved performance of music playback actions.
• Improved display of metadata information when browsing music items (songs, albums, etc.)
• Improved playback of a selected song within a playlist.
• Improved playback of songs from subscribed Apple Music playlists.
• Pressing Space on a selected song items now shows the details for that song (album, artist, genre, etc.).
• Improved “Show in Music” action for playlists.
• Improved “Info browsing” of songs (when pressing Shift-Right) to also show BPM and bitrate information.
• Changed “Show in Music” action shortcut to Command-Return.
• Attempting to start playback of more than 100 songs now asks for confirmation.
• Fixed the “Show in Music” action, which didn’t work anymore.
• Fixed browsing of playlist folders, which didn’t work anymore.
• Fixed an issue causing the “Play in Random Order” action (when opening an album with Option-Return) sometimes not to play the songs in random order.
• Fixed an issue causing the songs of an album to be played back in wrong order under some circumstances.

New features

• Added “Remove All Spaces” text conversion action to built-in actions.
• Added “Acronym Finder” search template.
• Added “DuckDuckGo Images” search template.
• Added “DuckDuckGo Videos” search template.
• Added “Google Translate to English” search template.
• Added “Google Translate to German” search template.

Other improvements and bug fixes

• Improved support of Apple Silicon Macs.
• Improved “Current Safari Page” action. The action now also retrieves the title of the page. Invoking the action now selects the page URL in LaunchBar making it accessible for subsequent actions.
• Improved “Recompress” actions (for creating JPEG files with different compression ratios) to select the resulting JPEG file(s) in LaunchBar to make them accessible for subsequent actions.
• Improved info browsing of text items (when pressing Shift-Right) to also show the number of printable characters.
• Improved app indexing when using the “Search Everywhere” option.
• Changed shortcut for opening a Snippet in the default editor app to Shift-Command-Return.
• Fixed an issue on Apple Silicon Macs causing non-Universal (Apple Silicon only) applications not to be indexed.
• Fixed inadvertent triggering of “Instant Info Browsing” (which can be enabled in Preferences > Shortcuts for showing metadata of an item by pressing and holding the right arrow key).
• Improved display name of indexed System Preferences panes.
• Corrected display of some System Preferences pane icons on macOS Big Sur.
• Corrected “Lucky Google” action, which is performed search when confirming the entered search string with Command-Return (unfortunately, Google now shows an intermediate “Redirect Notice” page, though).
• Various minor bug fixes.

• Added “Apple Music” search template.
• Improved song metadata shown in the Info Browsing list.
• Improved browsing of Finder tags (via “Tags” indexing rule or category).
• Improved enforcing of subtitle display while pressing the Control-Option-Command modifier keys.
• Showing a message dialog when an action cannot be performed due to missing permission in System Preferences > Security > Privacy > Accessibility.
• Fixed: Sending text to a search template via Send-to or Instant Send didn’t work.
• Fixed: When copying an email address, a mailto-URL was copied instead.
• Fixed: Missing encoding of #-character in web searches.
• Various minor bug fixes.

macOS Big Sur

• Added support for macOS Big Sur.
• Refined the default theme to blend nicely with the new appearance of macOS Big Sur.

Music

• Re-implemented Music Library indexing.
• Added compatibility with Music.app on macOS Catalina.
• Songs and albums are now displayed with their album artwork.
• Updated Music playback actions.

Search Templates

• Improved management of search templates. There’s now a set of built-in, non-editable search templates, which are kept up to date automatically. And there’s another, separate set of “Custom Search Templates” where you can define your own web searches.
• Updated built-in search templates.
• Added “All Music” search template (allmusic.com).
• Added “Ecosia” and “Ecosia Images” search templates (ecosia.org).
• Added German localization of search template names.

Search window

• Improved browsing of sub-search results. When browsing “backwards” (with the left arrow key), a previous sub-search result is preserved.
• Improved handling of empty groups in item list.
• Improved automatic display of subtitles in item list during browsing.

Actions

• Updated and improved image conversion actions (rotate, flip, resize, compress, etc.). They are now better chainable with subsequent actions – the resulting images can be immediately sent to another action.
• Improved help texts of all built-in actions.
• A brief description of each action is now displayed in the action’s subtitle.
• Updated “Search Dash” action.

Improvements and bug fixes

• Some significant “under the hood” modernization of the entire codebase.
• Improved conversion of filename extension to lowercase when renaming a file. The conversion is now performed only if the entire extension is uppercase (example: .JPG → .jpg)
• Reorganized sidebar in index window.
• Improved compatibility with third-party apps trying to figure out if screen recording is allowed.
• Fixed an occasional crash when typing a menu keyboard shortcut.
• Fixed an issue when indexing Finder tags which could result in duplicate tags.
• Fixed: Opening JavaScript files in Action Editor opened them in Safari.

• Added Support for macOS Catalina (10.15)
• Improved drag & drop to close the window automatically when items are dragged from LaunchBar to make sure that the LaunchBar window doesn’t cover the desired dragging destination.
• Improved ClipMerge to more reliably detect copies made by Shift-Clicking a menu item.
• Improved Dark Mode support.
• Fixed an issue causing repeated updates of the iCloud Tabs index.

• Re-added missing „Search Dash“ action.

Bug fixes and improvements

• When using actions that show suggestions during text input (like DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia or Google searches) it’s now possible to press Right Arrow to update the suggestions list based on the currently selected suggestion text.
• Fixed an issue causing the Clipboard History to stop working after copying text containing certain characters.
• Fixed an issue causing App Store searches via LaunchBar not to work on macOS Mojave.
• Fixed an issue when entering calendar events spanning several days in the form “event @ jan 12 - 14” causing the event to be created with a date in the past.
• Fixed: The Safari iCloud Tabs indexing rule didn’t work with the most recent versions of Safari.
• Fixed: Opening folders located on iCloud Drive didn’t open that folder in Finder or Path Finder.
• LaunchBar now shows a message when Full Disk Access is required for a particular indexing rule. For example, indexing Safari Bookmarks on macOS Mojave only works if Full Disk Access is granted.
• Improved auto-hiding of LaunchBar when clicking outside the LaunchBar window.
• Fixed: Creating a new search template didn’t work properly when the index window’s search field was not empty.

Compatibility with macOS Mojave

This version of LaunchBar is compatible with macOS Mojave, but due to improved privacy protection in macOS Mojave, some LaunchBar features require additional permissions to be granted in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy:

• Indexing of Safari Bookmarks requires LaunchBar to be added to “Full Disk Access”. Otherwise LaunchBar won’t be able to read the bookmarks file, which is located in your Library folder.
• Instant Send and Get/Drop Finder Selection require LaunchBar to be added to “Accessibility”. Otherwise LaunchBar won’t be able to simulate a Command-C keystroke, which is necessary for reading the currently selected text or file.
• The Clipboard History also requires LaunchBar to be added to “Accessibility”. Otherwise LaunchBar won’t be able to simulate a Command-V keystroke, which is necessary when inserting data from the Clipboard History in other applications.

Dark Mode support

LaunchBar now supports Dark Mode in macOS Mojave. Note that the appearance of LaunchBar’s main interface is still determined by the selected theme, independent from the current system appearance. So if you’ve selected the Dark Mode in Mojave, you can choose one of the dark themes in LaunchBar (Dark or Base Dark).

In a future update there will be an option to automatically change LaunchBar’s theme in accordance with the current system appearance (provided that the chosen theme also provides a dark variant).

Other changes

• LaunchBar 6.10 now requires at least OS X 10.10 or later. If you are running an older OS version, you can download a compatible version here.

• Improved incrementing/decrementing integers during text input to preserve leading zeros.
• Fixed: Command-clicking didn’t work anymore for staging individual items in the list.
• Fixed a crash when attempting to move the LaunchBar window on macOS 10.11 and earlier.

Further improved compatibility with 1Password 7

• [NEW] Info browsing of 1Password Login items (selecting the item in LaunchBar and pressing Right Arrow) now also provides access to the item’s Autofill Link. This link can be copy/pasted to other documents – opening them will then open the corresponding login page in your web browser and autofill the login form.
• It’s now possible (again) to open non-Login items (like credit cards, secure notes, etc.) via LaunchBar to opens 1Password’s summary window showing all the details of that item.
• It’s now possible (again) to trigger a search in 1Password by selecting the 1Password app in LaunchBar and then pressing Shift-Space.

New Features and Improvements

• [NEW] Numeric increments during text input. You can now press Command-Up/Down during text input to increment/decrement a number at the cursor position by one, or press Shift-Command-Up/Down to increment/decrement it by ten. This comes quite handy in LaunchBar’s calculator, but can be used in many other situations as well, whenever numeric text input is involved (in custom actions, when renaming files, etc.).
• [NEW] Indexing of Share Menu Actions can now be turned on/off separately in the Options pane of the Actions indexing rule.
• Improved handling of file items returned by a custom action during text input as a live result. It’s now possible to invoke file actions on these files (like Send-to, Move, Copy, Rename, Duplicate, Get Info, etc.).
• Command-dragging the LaunchBar window now also works during text input.
• Improved “Enter Text” action: Shift-Return (to insert the entered text in the frontmost app) now also explicitly hides the LaunchBar app.
• Spaces in search template arguments are now only encoded with plus (“+”) in case of HTTP(S) and x-launchbar URLs.
• Improved error handling for actions implemented as shell scripts.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Clipboard History failed to detect images and PDF content copied from Safari.
• Fixed: Clipboard History > Ignore Applications didn’t work for 1Password 7 if it was added manually in the preferences window.
• Fixed an issue with the “Browse Ulysses” action causing sections not to appear.
• Fixed a crash when passing text containing a NULL character to actions implemented as shell scripts.
• Fixed a crash when LaunchBar tried to determine whether another application can open documents and that application’s Info.plist was malformed.

Compatibility with 1Password 7

• If you have both version 7 and version 6 of 1Password installed on your computer, LaunchBar will by default index the items from the newer version. If you prefer to access the version 6 data instead, you can uncheck the “Prefer latest version of 1Password” option in the Options pane of the index window.

Other improvements and bug fixes

• Added support for accessing repositories in Tower 3
• Fixed an issue with LaunchBar’s built-in calculator when using custom bc definition files in ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Calculator
• Fixed: Indexing of birthdays could fail if a contact was linked across multiple accounts.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed various scripts that deal with phone numbers not working on macOS 10.13.2. This includes actions like “Call with iPhone”, “Call with Skype”, “Call with FaceTime”, and “Send iMessage”.
• Fixed an issue introduced in LaunchBar 6.9.3 where actions like “Compose iMessage” would send text as a file attachment instead of, you know, just text.
• Fixed revealing reminder items and clicking notifications after creating a reminder on macOS 10.13 not working.
• Fixed “Run iTerm Command” built-in action not working with newer versions of iTerm.
• Fixed an issue where an empty window would become visible when using SwitchResX.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue causing LaunchBar to hang under some circumstances when browsing the list with the arrow keys.
• Fixed another issue causing LaunchBar to become active when switching spaces.
• Fixed an issue in the Browse Ulysses action.

Improvements

• Updated the built-in “Browse Ulysses” action. It now supports the subscription, non-subscription and Setapp versions of Ulysses.
• Added support for LaunchBar actions to use images stored in an app’s asset catalog (Assets.car file).
• Added support for sending selected text to macOS Sharing Actions that normally only support sending files. You can now AirDrop any text from LaunchBar to another Mac or iOS device.
• Improved 1Password info browsing to allow opening of URLs.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed Recent Documents of apps not updating on macOS High Sierra (10.13).
• Fixed an issue where an additional invisible window would be added to the list of LaunchBar’s windows for VoiceOver users on macOS High Sierra (10.13). This could also cause slowdowns in third-party app and window switchers.
• Fixed an issue where LaunchBar would sometimes steal the active app’s keyboard focus after switching spaces on macOS High Sierra (10.13).
• Fixed a bug that caused the Calculate MD5/SHA1/SHA256 Checksum actions to not work.
• Fixed LaunchBar causing macOS to ask if you want to download the Osaka font.
• Fixed emoji icons being cut off on macOS Sierra (10.12).
• Fixed missing contact images for contact that are stored in multiple accounts.

This version makes LaunchBar compatible with macOS High Sierra (10.13). In particular it addresses compatibility issues in the following areas:

• Emoji indexing
• Recent Documents browsing

Appearance

• Re-organized Themes.
• Changed Default Theme. The previous default theme is still available (it has been renamed to “Base”).
• Improved legibility in the new Default Theme.
• Modernized design of the index window.

Things 3 Integration

• Added support for Things 3.
• Much improved “Add to Things” action. The action now accepts multiple lines (typically via Send to) to generate multiple to-tos, one for each line. Provides feedback via user notification, describing what has been added.
• Added actions for opening lists in Things 3 (Inbox, Today, Upcoming, Anytime, Someday). These actions are accessible either directly via abbreviation search, or by browsing the Things application (select Things in LaunchBar and press Right Arrow).

1Password Integration

• Improved 1Password indexing.
• Improved opening 1Password logins.
• Removed legacy support for 1Password versions before 6.5.

Other Improvements

• Standard “Natural Scrolling” behavior in search result list.
• Improved URL input when entering a colon while the TLD is selected. This now inserts the colon before the trailing slash. Makes it easier to enter port numbers, like in http://example.com:80/
• Improved searching within results of custom actions.
• Improved Emoji skin tone support.
• Improved Instant Calculate to ignore IPv4 addresses.
• Disabled actions are no longer shown when browsing an application’s associated actions.
• Fixed handling of “actionArgument” in JavaScript based custom actions.
• Improved Safari Tabs action to work with Safari opened full screen on a different space.
• Fixed incorrect display of reminder item priorities.
• Fixed DuckDuckGo action. Due to a bug introduced in macOS 10.12.5 the search result wasn’t opened in the default browser (e.g. Safari) but in some other browser (e.g. Firefox).
• Fixed “Send iMessage” action (stopped working due to a bug in macOS 10.12.5).

Improved 1Password integration

• Thanks to the enhanced 3rd party integration of 1Password 6.5 we are now able to provide much more comprehensive access to your 1Password items.
• It’s now possible to access all kinds of items (not only logins but also credit cards, secure notes, etc.) from all vaults.
• 1Password categories (Logins, Passwords, Secure Notes, Credit Cards, Software Licenses, etc.) are now indexed. You can for example type CC to select 1Password’s “Credit Cards” category. You can then browse that category to get a list of all your credit cards stored in 1Password.
• Browsing 1Password by selecting the 1Password app and pressing Right Arrow now provides a list of all available 1Password categories.
• Opening items that don’t perform a login on a website are now showing a window for viewing and editing that item.

Actions

• New “Safari Tabs” action provides access to all tabs that are currently opened in Safari. Allows to quickly switch to one of those tabs with the keyboard.
• New “Font Awesome Icons” action. Provides a list of all icons available in Font Awesome. You can sub-search that list for a particular icon by name, then press right arrow to access details of that icon (Icon Identifier, Unicode, HTML snippet for inserting that icon in your web-page, a link to the icon’s Font Awesome web-page). Font Awesome icons can also be used in your custom LaunchBar actions. Just specify the icon’s “Icon Identifier” in Action Editor.
• New “Wiktionary” and “Wikiquote” actions with live suggestions.
• New localized “Wikipedia”, “Wiktionary” and “Wikiquote” actions to access those wikis in your preferred non-English language version (according to System Preferences > Language & Region > Preferred languages).
• Existing search templates for Wikipedia and Wiktionary are removed from the configuration. Please use the new actions instead. It may be necessary to re-train your abbreviations for these items.
• Improved indexing of macOS Sharing Service actions.
• Updated Sample Actions (they can be downloaded from obdev.at/launchbar/actions.html)

Improved Emoji support

• Emoji character names are now the same as those in the macOS Character Palette.
• It’s now possible to search for emoji by alternative names. For example, type SPORT to find the basketball emoji, or type SPOCK to find a greeting gesture from a place where no man has gone before.
• Links to Emojipedia (accessible via Info Browsing of an emoji that’s selected in LaunchBar) now work more reliably with all kinds of emoji, including skin tone modified versions.

Other Improvements

• Improved Calendar input allowing to specify alarms at the time of the event. Example: “Call mom @ 3pm !0min” or just “Call mom @ 3pm !0”
• Browsing the Contacts app now shows the Birthdays category, which provides a chronological list of all upcoming birthdays starting from today.
• Improved Info Browsing of indexing rules (showing number of indexed items, date of last index update and the item’s indexing rule).
• Improved Info Browsing of categories to show the number of items in that category.
• Improved Info Browsing allowing to sub-search the displayed item by their label.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Browsing into an application to access recent documents or other items related to that app sometimes stopped working.
• Fixed: Calendar events and reminders were created without time zone information.
• The Clipboard History now shows the correct number of characters if the copied text contains emoji characters.
• Fixed: Blinking text cursor disappeared while typing in LaunchBar Calculator or while browsing suggestions during text input.
• Disabling an indexing rule now frees the memory occupied by items of that rule.

New Features and Improvements

• Added “Preferred Input Source” preference option, allowing to choose a keyboard input source that will be used in favor of the currently active input source while LaunchBar is active.
• Improved compatibility with macOS Sierra (10.12).

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an incompatibility with Tower version 2.5.
• Fixed a bug in the built-in MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 checksum actions causing a wrong checksum being calculated for data larger than 4 GB. Furthermore the performance of these action has been significantly improved for large files.
• Fixed: The “Browse Ulysses” action did not work on OS X 10.9 and OS X 10.10.
• Fixed a crash in LaunchBar’s Action Editor.
• Fixed an issue causing the “Select Folder” contextual menu action in the Options pane of a folder indexing rule to stop working under some circumstances.
• Fixed a potential crash in the Clipboard History when copying RTF or RTFD data (happened in particular when copying data in Accordance.app).

Improved character icons for custom actions

• LaunchBar Actions and their result items that use a character as an icon using the previously introduced character:X syntax can now specify the font in which the character should be rendered using a pseudo-URL-query like syntax or the iconFont property (result items only). Example: character:X?font=Futura
• For characters that cannot be rendered in the system font LaunchBar now uses a fallback mechanism to find an appropriate font.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a potential crash when an action returned a result item that had a path and icon set.
• Fixed an issue on OS X 10.9 causing the index window to fail opening the Options pane of some indexing rules.
• Fixed: Sorting by “date added” by pressing Shift-Command-Right didn’t work anymore. This also affected browsing the Downloads folder, which sorts by “date added” automatically.
• Fixed a crash when editing the “Skip Subfolders” or “Exclude Items” options of a folder indexing rule.

• Added support for Emoji, Font Awesome icons, and arbitrary characters as icons for LaunchBar Actions and their result items. More information is available in our developer documentation.
• Added setClipboardString() and clearClipboard() functions to LaunchBar JavaScript.
• New LaunchBar AppleScript property “expects abbreviation input”.
• Added Ulysses support. Conveniently browse your Ulysses library with LaunchBar.
• Added support for iTerm 2 version 2.9 or newer.
• Improved phone number handling in “Call with iPhone”, “Call with FaceTime” and “Call with Facetime Audio” actions.
• Improved handling of hanging action scripts written in AppleScript.
• Improved 1Password integration.
• Improved Clipboard History behavior with EagleFiler.
• Fixed: “Call with FaceTime Audio” action triggered video instead of audio call.
• Fixed: Shift-Return didn’t always open items in the current window.
• Fixed: Under certain circumstances, modifier keys in script-based actions did not work as expected.
• Fixed: Unexpected subtitle, label and badge behavior if script-based actions returned items with path.
• Fixed: Issues with resolving tilde and symlinks in paths of script-based actions’ result items.
• Other bugfixes and improvements.

• Fixed an incompatibility with OS X 10.9 and 10.10.
• Improved sort order of folder contents when browsing with the left/right arrow keys.

• Restored the previous behavior of ⌘V to paste clipboard data onto LaunchBar.
• Added “Drop From Clipboard” action (⌥⌘V). Applies the clipboard data (file, URL, text) to the currently selected item (opens a copied URL in the selected application, searches for a copied text with the selected search template, etc.)
• The DuckDuckGo action now supports ⇧↩ to instantly perform a search using the last entered text.
• Custom Actions can now declare to support ⇧↩ by turning on the new “Reapply last string argument with ⇧↩” option in Action Editor.
• Fixed: Alert Panels could be obscured by the LaunchBar input window.
• Fixed: Dragging files onto a folder that’s selected in LaunchBar didn’t work (the list of available file operations wasn’t shown, the LaunchBar window just disappeared).
• Fixed: When sending a file to a folder via Send To (by pressing the Tab key), the list of available file operations didn’t recognize the numeric keyboard shortcuts 1-6.
• Fixed: Issue when dragging text or files to the LaunchBar window.
• Other bug fixes and stability improvements.

New Features

• Added optional Modifier Tap for accessing Snippets. Can be configured in Preferences > Shortcuts.
• The iCloud Drive item can now be used as a target for Send To operations.
• Info Browsing of images in the Clipboard History now shows metadata like image dimensions, resolution, color profile, etc.
• Back browsing with the Left-Arrow key after invoking an action that returns new items now brings back the previous selection – either the action itself (if it was opened via Return or via Text Input), or the source item of a Send To operation (the item that was sent to the action via Tab).
• Improved Send To (pressing Tab) in Calculator. If there’s no text selected (i.e. the cursor is blinking), the result of the current calculation is sent, as before. But if you select a part of the calculation, only that selected text is sent.

iTunes

• Attempting to play a remote track while the computer is offline now shows a message explaining why the playback is currently not possible.
• When browsing the Albums category (which shows a list of all albums) the display now includes the album artist in addition to the album title.
• The iTunes/Now Playing info (shown when pressing Right Arrow while iTunes is selected) now displays artist or album information for the currently playing track.
• Improved heuristics to determine which tracks belong to the same album (should now work same as in iTunes).
• Fixed an issue causing some iTunes actions to fail if the iTunes Today Widget was enabled in Notification Center.
• Fixed an issue when re-indexing the iTunes Library.
• Fixed an issue with Identically Named Songs.

Improved Emoji Support

• Added a dedicated hotkey for opening the list of Emoji (Default is Shift-Command-Space).
• Browsing the Emoji indexing rule with Right Arrow now first shows a list of all Emoji Categories (like “Activity”, “Objects”, “Smileys & People”, etc.). Pressing Right Arrow again then only shows Emoji from the selected category. To get a flat list of all Emoji, browse the Emoji rule with the Space key.
• Emoji are now sorted by “last access”. The most recently used Emoji are therefore shown at the top of the list. You can still get all Emoji sorted alphabetically by browsing the Emoji rule with Command-Right.
• Added “Skin Colored Emoji” category. This category contains all Emoji whose skin tone can be modified.
• Info Browsing now provides a link to Emojipedia for the selected Emoji.

New Actions

• Added “Calculate SHA256 Checksum” action.
• Added actions for removing line breaks from text
  • Join Lines
  • Join Lines With Space
  • Join Lines With Comma
• Added “Send Little Snitch Feedback” action.
• Added “Send Micro Snitch Feedback” action.

Custom Actions

• Added support for Quick Look in the Resources tab of Action Editor.
• Improved include() JavaScript function: Now accepts absolute paths, resolves tilde (~) in path and resolves symbolic links in path.
• Added support for parallel HTTP requests in JavaScript.

Improvements

• “Copy (and Paste) File Contents” now works with more plain text file formats (including Markdown).
• Improved backwards browsing (with the Left-Arrow key) when switching between different input modes (Text Input, Send To).
• Instant Calculate (sending an arithmetic expression to LaunchBar via Send To) now ignores currency symbols in the sent expression.
• Applying file path(s) via ⌘V (Paste) or ⌘D (Drop Finder Selection) to a selected item now behaves the same as when these path(s) are sent to that item via Send To, i.e. a list of available file operations is shown (instead of the former pop-up menu).
• Improved dragging of files onto LaunchBar. Dragging to right end of the bar selects the dragged file in LaunchBar. Dragging to the left side of the bar applies the dragged file to the selected item.
• Improved “Duplicate” action.

Other Changes

• Removed “Show text input title” option from preferences.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: After running an AppleScript “LaunchBar AppleScript Runner” would sometimes not terminate properly and instead run indefinitely.
• Fixed: Missing color of Finder Tags when running on OS X 10.11.
• Fixed: When dragging the LaunchBar window, snap to center / snap to default position didn’t work on external displays.
• Fixed an issue causing 1Password bookmarks indexing to fail.
• iTunes indexing now ignores iOS apps, iPad apps and iBooks.
• Fixed: Instant Send of whitespace string no longer triggers Calculator.
• Fixed wrong Merriam Webster Search Template URLs in factory configuration.
• Fixed an issue causing rules that were configured to not search subfolders to be never re-indexed.

Support for OS X El Capitan

• Added two new El Capitan themes that use of the new system font.
• Recent document indexing is finally reliable again, but only when running on OS X El Capitan.

Other Improvements

• Added diversity options for emojis. Also, the Emoji rule now lets you choose your preferred skin tone color. Requires OS X 10.10.3 or newer.
• LaunchBar window now snaps to vertical and horizontal positions when dragged.
• LaunchBar window now works better with hidden menu bars.
• iTunes tracks: Computed ratings are no longer displayed.
• LaunchBar Actions: Added support for template images in result items independent from the image’s name (iconIsTemplate).
• Applications indexing rule is now a valid Send-to target.
• Updated Google icon in search action.

Bugfixes

• Fixed bug causing LaunchBar’s window to stay on screen after finishing text input with suggestions.
• Fixed bug causing texts to be truncated on OS X 10.9.
• Lots of other bugfixes.

• Minor improvements to LaunchBar Action Editor.
• Added support for searching in Dash 3.
• Extended list of currency symbols that are ignored in calculator expressions.
• Google suggestions now use HTTPS.
• Fixed: LaunchBar crashed when opening some files or folders in iCloud Drive.
• Fixed: The actions indexing rule was continuously re-indexed because the OS X Action Extensions seemed to have changed (this resulted in high CPU usage by LaunchBar and “pkd”).
• Fixed: LaunchBar did not find Emojis with a long name when typing only a short abbreviation.
• Fixed: Opening a location in Maps launched Safari as a side effect if the “Open URLs in current Safari window or tab” option was enabled
• Fixed: After Send-to, some operations acted on the previous target item instead of on the visible item.
• Fixed: Wrong number of visible items being shown when typing an abbreviation after Instant Send.

New Features

• LaunchBar now includes a new Action Editor, making it easier than ever to create incredible actions. Start developing with script templates, configure your action’s runtime behavior, manage localizations and more. Find a detailed feature list below.
• “New Folder with Selection” action for multiple selections. The action can be triggered via Shortcut (Control-Command-N) and it’s also accessible via Send-To.
• Shared Snippets: You can now select one or more additional snippets folders. Especially useful when synced via cloud services to share certain snippets with other computers, co-workers or friends. Works with any kind of syncing service such as iCloud, Dropbox, SparkleShare, OmniPresence, BitTorrent Sync, etc.

Improvements

• Currency symbols are ignored during calculations.
• Instant Calculate: Sending a single number to Calculator now selects the entire number, which makes it easier to apply functions like sin(), sqrt(), etc.
• Improved detection of plain text files.
• Info Browsing can now also be triggered with Shift-Right if there are currently no staged items.
• iCloud documents are now opened with the default application.
• Improved list of an application’s recent documents.

Bugfixes

• Fixed unreliable music playback with iTunes 12 when shuffle mode is active.
• Fixed an issue causing “Search Dash” action to crash on OS X Mavericks.

[NEW] Action Editor

The Action Editor is included in LaunchBar 6.4 and can be easily opened via shortcut (Option-Command-E), abbreviation search or LaunchBar menu.

Get an overview of all your installed actions

• Several filter options: Built-in Actions, Custom Actions, My Actions, Recently Modified
• Search for actions with certain properties.
• Share actions via E-Mail, Messages, AirDrop

Create new or modify existing actions

• Easily create new actions from scratch or duplicate existing actions for customization.

• Configure action properties, runtime behavior, and more. Values are pre-filled where possible.

• Configure and modify action scripts with various scripting languages.

  • Script templates provided for AppleScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Shell script and Swift.
  • Easily add or remove Suggestions Scripts and Action URL scripts.
  • Configure script properties.
  • Open scripts in default editor for editing.

• Manage action resources

  • Add, rename or delete resources.
  • Set image as action icon.

• Manage localization

  • Add or remove localizations.
  • Manage localizable strings.

Other Features

• Drag & Drop support for scripts, resources, action icon and more.
• Easily open existing actions in Action Editor
  • From LaunchBar’s indexing window.
  • By sending the action via Send-To.
  • By double-clicking already installed actions in Finder.
• Preferences to configure reused information like preferred script type, own bundle identifier prefix, contact information.

Improved Tags support

We’ve improved our support for Finder tags, allowing you to better work with multiple tags. You can search for files that have multiple tags set, and you can apply multiple tags (add, remove or replace them) in one go. To select multiple tags, you can use LaunchBar’s staging feature.

• Sending one or more files to the Add/Remove/Replace Tags actions presents a list of all available tags (as it did before), but you can now select multiple tags from that list.
• Items can now be sent to multiple tags to add, remove or replace all existing tags in one go.
• When multiple tags are selected in LaunchBar, pressing Return now presents a list of items that have all these tags set. To search for these multi-tagged items in Finder instead, you can press Command-Return.
• The tags of an item, that are shown during Info Browsing (by pressing Option-Right) can now be removed conveniently just by pressing Command-Delete. This also works for multiple tags.
• Fixed some tag indexing issues: Items with multiple tags or with legacy color labels were not properly indexed under some circumstances.

Multiple Selection Dragging

Well, we announced this feature already in our 6.2 release notes. But due to an embarrassing mistake in our build process, the feature was not enabled in the released version. But now it finally works and you can drag multiple items from LaunchBar to other applications!

Other Improvements

• Added “Detect Search Templates” bookmarks indexing option. This restores the previous behavior of the bookmarks indexer to automatically detect search templates (URLs containing an asterisk) in your web browser’s bookmarks. If you rather want these URLs to be indexed as regular bookmarks, you can turn off this option.
• Added “Instant Calculate” option to Calculator preferences. When you Instant-Send an arithmetic expression to LaunchBar, it automatically calculates and shows the result. When you send a plain number, it’s automatically opened in LaunchBar’s calculator. With this new option you can turn off this behavior, if you prefer to just send the text without any calculator magic.
• The dict.cc action now performs its queries via https.
• Fixed: The “Move to Trash” action didn’t work for multiple items in conjunction with Path Finder.
• Improved display of action result items.

New Features and Improvements

• Staging: Multiple items in the result list can now also be selected by dragging with the mouse.
• Multiple selections (i.e. staged items) can now be dragged from LaunchBar to other applications.
• Added support for Fantastical 2.
• Improved iCloud Documents / iCloud Drive indexing.
• Improved appearance of large type window on OS X Yosemite.
• User account items now show the user’s account image.
• Added support for showing multiple paths in Large Type.
• Improved “Search Dash” action and added support for Dash Beta.
• Improved background execution of AppleScripts.
• Improved Info Browsing of contact details (phone numbers, email addresses, social profiles, etc.).
• Improved subtitle display of contact details that have been selected via full index search.
• The “Display in Large Type” action now also works for file paths.
• Software Update checks are now performed via https.

Calculator

• Improved Instant Calculate to better distinguish between phone numbers and arithmetic expressions.
• Improved Instant Calculate for multiple lines of selected text.
• Sending a plain number via Instant Send to LaunchBar now opens that number in Calculator.
• Improved automatic insertion of plus operator.
• Improved number detection.

Configuration Interface

• Improved information on invalid rules in index window.
• The index window now shows the full path of Custom Lists items, and their path is now editable.

LaunchBar Actions

• If two actions have the same bundle identifier, only the one with the higher version will be included in the index. This is important if you’re an Action Developer: Make sure all your actions have a unique bundle identifier and a valid version in the format “major.minor.bugfix”, e.g. “1.4.12”.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Pasting clipboard items into Safari form fields sometimes didn’t work.
• Fixed an issue causing the Clipboard History to stop working.
• Fixed: When deleting iCloud documents, Finder did not become active reliably to show its confirmation dialog.
• Fixed: Developer Resources indexing.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when using the current WebKit nightly.

• Fixed a crash when using the Wikipedia search action.
• Fixed an issue where rounded corners were not updated in some themes.
• Fixed an issue when adding OmniWeb or Opera bookmarks rule to the index.
• Web bookmarks indexing no longer creates search templates for URLs containing an asterisk.

• Added support for third party sharing services (accessible via Actions indexing rule).
• Automatic formatting of displayed phone numbers (same format as in Contacts.app).
• Fixed an incompatibility with 1Password 5.
• Fixed an issue when indexing the latest Developer Documentation.
• Fixed some issues when hovering the action menu button with the mouse on OS X Yosemite.
• Fixed an issue causing LaunchBar to sometimes become visible when a volume got mounted or unmounted.
• Fixed: Automatic index updates sometimes didn’t work reliably for some indexing rules (Safari History, Chrome History, Firefox Bookmarks and History, Contacts/Previous Recipients).
• Improved actions indexing to follow symbolic links.
• Command-A no longer creates a multiple selection when the item list ist closed.

• Wikipedia Search now shows more detailed suggestions while typing the search term.
• Fixes a bug that caused certain applications not to appear in the index.
• Improves left/right navigation during auto-activation (for example, while browsing running applications with Command-Space,Space).

Improvements & Bug Fixes

• List navigation with vi/Emacs shortcuts (Control-N, Control-P, Control-I, Control-J, Control-K) now also works during text input.
• To prevent conflicts with Emacs shortcuts, the “vi” arrow keys (Control-H/J/K/L) can now be turned off completely in LaunchBar Preferences > Shortcuts.
• Fixed: Browsing with Control-L didn’t work.
• Info Browsing by pressing and holding the right arrow key is now turned off by default. It can be turned on via LaunchBar Preferences > Shortcuts > Instant Info Browsing.
• Improved application indexing to better exclude certain irrelevant apps inside the Xcode.app file package.
• Improved Calculator history browsing (select LaunchBar’s Calculator, then press right arrow). Opening a history item with ↩ opens the result in Calculator (same as before). But opening the item with Space now opens the expression instead.
• LaunchBar no longer appears on screen when it’s opened automatically at login.
• Fixed an issue causing LaunchBar to appear when unlocking the screen after wake from sleep.
• Fixed indexing of previous email recipients.
• Fixed: ⌘W for closing the LaunchBar window didn’t work during text input.

LaunchBar Actions

• Actions implemented as workflows can now return files.
• Action result items now open their URL or path if no action was set.
• An action’s result items can now optionally specify a “label” and/or a “badge” which will be displayed at the right side of the result list.
• Quick Look can now be triggered with ⌘Y during text input. Useful for previewing the results of some custom actions.
• The new “alwaysShowsSubtitle” attribute can be used to enforce the display of subtitles, even if the “Show all subtitles” option is turned off in LaunchBar Preferences > Appearance.

General

• Info Browsing can now be triggered by pressing and holding the right arrow key. This allows triggering Info Browsing without an additional modifier key.

• New Yosemite Dark theme.

• Improve Yosemite theme.

• Additional OS X Yosemite related UI improvements.

• New “Call with iPhone” action for OS X Yosemite (requires an iPhone running iOS 8).

• LaunchBar now properly supports pasting into TextExpander fill-in windows.

• Improved actions for ejecting volumes:

  • New “Eject” action to eject volumes via Send To
  • Improved “Eject All Ejectable Volumes” action
  • Both actions are browsable, allowing to choose the volume(s) to be ejected.

• Improved opening of multiple disk images.

• Improved Info Browsing of file paths.

• The Calculator history is now also accessible by browsing the Calculator action.

• Improved date parsing for entering Calendar and Reminder events.

• Improved “Move to Trash” behavior (including new confirmation alerts when attempting to trash many items or items from different folders).

• Improved display of Tower repositories.

• Improved display of Cyberduck bookmark files (and removed support for Cyberduck versions prior 3.8).

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: Unreliable Instant Open behavior on OS X Yosemite.
• Fixed: Usage counters were not properly incremented for Tower repositories and Development Resources.

LaunchBar Actions

• Added LaunchBar.executeAppleScriptFile() JavaScript function.
• Improved handling of executable path in LaunchBar.execute()

General

• [NEW] Staging Area for creating multiple selections (see below for details).
• Changed keyboard shortcuts for Info Browsing from ⇧→ to ⌥→ and “Show Siblings” from ⇧← to ⌥←. These changes became necessary to allow a more consistent set of shortcut used for staging.
• Added support for Tower 2 repository bookmark indexing and browsing.
• Improved “Compress (ZIP Archive)” action to support multiple selections.
• Improved “Move to Trash” action with undo support.
• Improved “Sort Lines” actions to preserve the string’s trailing newline.
• Improved calculator to properly handle large numbers up to 1,189731495e+4932.
• Improved “New Folder” action to suggest a different folder name if an “untitled folder” already exists.
• Improved Info Browsing to show download date if available.
• Improved “Duplicate” action (⇧⌘D) to also trigger “Rename” so you can immediately apply a reasonable name to the duplicate.
• Improved accessibility support.

[NEW] Staging Area

• Concept of multiple selections in LaunchBar. To learn more about this new feature, read our blog post.

• Shortcuts to create multiple selections:

  • ⇧↑ or ⇧↓ stages/unstages a range of items.
  • ⌘↑ or ⌘↓ toggles staging of the selected item.
  • Comma stages the selected item.
  • ⌘-Click toggles staging of the clicked item.
  • ⇧-Click stages/unstages a range of items.
  • ⌘-A stages all items in current list.
  • ⌫ unstages the selected item.
  • Escape or ⇧⌫ clears the entire staging area.

• Acting on multiple selections

  • Open multiple items with ↩ (apps, files & folders, contacts & email addresses, bookmarks, emoji, snippets, songs, albums, …).
  • Press ⇥ to invoke Send To:
    • Open files with a particular application
    • Send files to a contact as email attachments
    • Move or copy files to a folder
    • Compress (ZIP Archive)
  • Use actions on multiple selections, for instance:
    • Move to Trash (⌘⌫)
    • Duplicate (⇧⌘D)
    • Eject (⌘E)
    • Copy (⌘C)
    • Get Info (⌘I)
    • Show in Finder (⌘↩)

• Inspecting and reviewing staged items

  • ⇧→ shows all currently staged items.
  • ⌫ unstages the selected item and removes it from the list.
  • While the list is displayed, the items can be rearranged with ⌥↑ or ⌥↓. Useful if the order is relevant (contacts, songs, attachments, …).

• Fetching staged items

  • ⇧← turns all selected items into a single “multiple selection” item (rarely necessary, though).
  • Necessary when opening multiple files from different folders (this is a safety measure, to prevent accidental opening of such a scattered selection).

Calendars & Reminders

• Calendar input is now more flexible and accepts description, location and date/time in arbitrary order (only the location must always be after the description):
  • <description> @ <date/time>
  • <date/time> @ <description>
  • <description> @ <location> @ <date/time>
  • <description> @ <date/time> @ <location>
  • <date/time> @ <description> @ <location>
• Date & Time can now also be specified relative to “now”, for example: “Call Susan @ 20min” to create a reminder that’s due in 20 minutes.

Contacts

• Birthday browsing: Showing contacts born on the same day or in the same year.
• Contact labels are permanently visible while browsing.
• Dedicated icons for social media profiles.

LaunchBar Actions

• URL-Scheme support for LaunchBar Actions. Actions can now optionally define a script that is called when a URL like x-launchbar:action/com.example.action is opened anywhere in OS X. See the Script Types for more details.

• Added support for LaunchBar Actions implemented as Automator Workflows.

• Added “Play Sound Effect” Automator action and AppleScript command.

• When an action returns a single item, Instant Send is turned on by default.

• Added an option that indicates when a script is run for the purpose of generating live feedback (LB_OPTION_LIVE_FEEDBACK).

• Added new JavaScript methods:

  • Added support for working with Base64 data and binary data. See Working with Binary Data for more information.
  • Added support for loading HTTP requests with arbitrary HTTP methods. Also added a convenience method for POST requests.
  • Added File.fileURLForPath() and File.pathForFileURL().
  • Added methods for opening and closing LaunchBar’s QuickLook window for any URL.
  • Added LaunchBar.systemVersion.

• Fixed: LaunchBar Actions implemented in AppleScript caused launch of applications during indexing. Also, these actions now must specifically declare in their Info.plist the fact that they accept or require arguments (previously, implementing the appropriate handler in the script was sufficient).

• Fixed: Action result items that only have a path or URL set didn’t appear in LaunchBar.

• Fixed: If LBResultType was set to path and that path contained the tilde character (˜), it was not expanded for the resulting items.

• Updated Developer Documentation to reflect changes and provide information on how to use the new features.

Other improvements and bug fixes

• x-launchbar URLs can now optionally contain a double forward slash after the scheme.
• Fixed an issue with “Open Location” where the TLD was not removed when entering a dot.
• Fixed ClipMerge behavior in iTerm 2 when its “Copy Selection” preference is enabled.
• Minor bug fixes and improvements.

New Features

• The “Enter Color” action now supports rebeccapurple (in honor of Rebecca Meyer).
• Added support for Safari History indexing on OS X Yosemite.
• Added “Encode to Base64” and “Decode as Base64” string transformation actions.
• ⌥-Escape can now be used to end sub-search without closing the item list.
• The Small theme is now attached to the menu bar by default. Of course, you can still move it to wherever you like it to be.

Improvements

• Additional mixed case conversion suggestions are now shown during Enter/Edit Text (scroll down the suggestion list to see them all).
• Improved uppercase/lowercase case conversion titles.
• Browsing the ~/Downloads folder now automatically sorts by Date Added.
• Reduced indexing frequency of some folder rules by ignoring changes in ~/Library unless the rule explicitly has its path set to a folder inside ~/Library.
• Minor wording and localization improvements.

Fixes

• Fixed: The default “Desktop” indexing rule didn’t index any subfolders.
• Fixed: “Sort Lines Descending” did sort ascending instead of descending.
• Fixed: ⇧↩ to paste in frontmost app didn’t work for browseable info items.
• Fixed: Play in Random Order didn’t work for albums.

LaunchBar Actions

• Improved JavaScript’s LaunchBar.execute() to accept an array of arguments.
• Added option for script action result items with an “action” set to specify whether their action should run in background (“actionRunsInBackground”).
• Fixed: Actions didn’t receive modifier flags while browsing with arrow keys.

General

• Added beautiful new icons to many built-in actions.

• New Prepend Text action (⇧⌘P).

• New built-in text transformation actions:

  • Case Conversions (UPPERCASE, lowercase, Titlecase, CamelCase, dromedaryCase, spinal-case, Train-Case, snake_case, SNAKE_CASE)
  • Calculate SHA1 Checksum
  • Calculate MD5 Checksum
  • Expand Tilde in Path
  • Abbreviate With Tilde in Path
  • Remove Percent Encoding
  • Add Percent Encoding
  • Remove Multiple Spaces
  • Sort Lines Ascending
  • Sort Lines Descending

• Improved plain text file content search (⌘F) to show live results.

• Added shortcut (⇧⌘→) to sort folder contents by Date Added.

• Added bookmarks indexing option allowing to index bookmarks from Safari’s Favorites Bar only.

• Extended Clipboard History capacity (up to 100 items or for a certain amount of days).

• Rearranged “New Indexing Rule” menu to reflect the structure of the sidebar

• Improved Theme switching: Default width will be applied only if different from the currently active theme.

• Added missing localizations.

• “Run Terminal Command” action only opens a second Terminal window if necessary.

• Fixed issue causing last calculator result variable “a” to be not updated.

• Fixed issue causing Append Text not to work via Send To (when sending text to a file).

• Fixed issue causing welcome window not to appear in front.

• Fixed issue causing iOS Simulator not to appear in LaunchBar’s index.

• Various other bug fixes and stability improvements.

LaunchBar JavaScript Actions

• Added LaunchBar.homeDirectory property for JavaScript actions.
• Added support for parsing plist content stored as JavaScript String – Plist.parse()
• Fixed issue causing JavaScript actions not being able to return plain text.

[NEW] Brand-new User Interface with Themes

• Larger default interface
• Several built-in alternative themes
• Theme switching via abbreviation search
• Plenty of new, beautifully designed icons
• New app icon

[NEW] Improved Configuration Interface

• Streamlined configuration UI
• Rules in the sidebar are now organized in groups.
• Configuration changes are now saved automatically.
• Index updates now happen fully automatically. The Schedule pane for configuring index updates is therefore no longer necessary.
• Deleting/adding rules is now the recommended way to select the desired set of features. Disabling of indexing rules is still possible, but only via contextual menu (no more checkboxes).

[NEW] Additional Indexing Rules

• Reminder Lists
• Emoji
• Finder Tags
• Safari iCloud Tabs
• Safari Top Sites
• Safari Reading List
• LaunchBar Themes
• Transmit Bookmarks

[NEW] Additional Built-in Actions

• Add/Remove/Replace Finder Tag
• Remove All Finder Tags
• Clear Text Input History
• Current Safari Page
• Enter Color
• Open AirDrop Window
• Send via AirDrop
• Send LaunchBar Feedback

[NEW] Powerful custom, script-based actions

• Extend LaunchBar’s feature set with custom actions written in your favorite scripting language (JavaScript, AppleScript, Python, Ruby, Shell Script, PHP, …)
• Custom actions can return arbitrary result items or suggestions that are displayed immediately, while entering text.
• Embedded resources like icons, helper scripts, audio files, binaries, …
• Optional execution in background.
• Simple double click installation of third-party actions.
• Optionally only allow execution of actions that have a valid code signature.

[NEW] Text Input Live Results

• Calendar & Reminder input live feedback.
• Calculator live results and history of previous calculations.
• “Open Location” provides suggestions while entering URLs.

[NEW] Live Web Searches

• Google
• Wikipedia
• DuckDuckGo
• dict.cc
• Support for custom live web searches via LaunchBar Actions.

[NEW] Info Browsing

• Press Shift-Right Arrow to access information about a selected item like:

  • Image Properties (dimensions, color profile, …)
  • File Size
  • Modification Date, Creation Date
  • Finder Tags
  • Disk Capacity & Usage
  • Plain text file contents
  • XML/plist file contents
  • An application’s user defaults
  • and more, …

• Info Browsing can also be triggered with ⌃⌥⌘-Right Arrow

• For many items it can also be triggered just by pressing Right Arrow.

[NEW] Usage Statistics

• Statistics about:
  • Superpower Usage
  • Saved Time
  • LaunchBar Invocations
• Accessible via ⌥⌘U shortcut or action menu.

Other Features

• Fully automatic index updates.
• Improved Send To target item suggestions (e.g. File Operations, Tag Actions, …)
• Improved presentation of contact cards, including contact images.
• Support for FaceTime Audio as caller script.
• Support for AirMail as default email client.
• Sending text to an item accepting text input (e.g. search actions) and pressing the space key opens text input to allow editing the search term.
• Improved Recent Documents browsing. Now includes all documents that can be opened with the selected application, sorted by access date. This allows you to access recently used documents even for apps that do not support the standard Cocoa API (like Adobe applications).
• Subtitle display is now turned off by default. Subtitles can be shown temporarily by holding down the ⌃⌥⌘ modifier keys.
• Back-tab (⇧⇥) during Send To now selects the previous item in the list (⇥ selects the next one).
• LaunchBar 6 requires OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Removed and Replaced Features

• The index window’s Schedule pane has been removed because it’s no longer needed. All index updates are now performed automatically.
• Removed .clip.rtf / .clip.txt support. The same functionality can be accomplished with the Snippets indexing rule.
• Replaced color label actions with corresponding actions for Finder tags.
• Removed support for legacy contacts applications (Entourage, Eudora, …)
• Removed support for legacy web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Camino, Shiira)
• Removed search templates that were replaced by live search actions.