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Start a Tembo search from LaunchBar

This post applies to Tembo 1.x. Please refer to the newer blog post for the updated URL scheme used by Tembo 2.

Tembo implements a custom URL scheme. This can be used with LaunchBar search templates to quickly start Tembo searches from within LaunchBar.

Tembo search URLs have the following format:

tmbo://search?searchString=Houdah&groupKey=DOCUMENTS&queryFocus=name

Such URLs can be invoked by any application, launcher, script, etc. In this article we will look at setting up a search template in LaunchBar.

The above link starts a Tembo search for documents with names containing “Houdah”. The text to search for is provided by the searchString parameter.

Possible values for the optional queryFocus parameter are:

default, name, content, any, tag, whereFrom

Possible values for the optional groupKey parameter are:

APPLICATIONS, BOOKMARKS, CONTACT, DIRECTORIES, DOCUMENTS, EVENT_TODO, EVERNOTE, FONTS, IMAGES, MESSAGES, MOVIES, MUSIC, PDF, SOURCE, SYSTEM_PREFS, XML

LaunchBar search templates allow you to quickly access search results on your preferred web site. Once you have set up a template, you can skip the search form and jump directly to the search results for the text you typed in LaunchBar.

  1. Click the LaunchBar Dock icon to bring the application to the front
  2. Select Show Index from the Index menu
  3. Select Web > Search Templates (UTF-8) from the sidebar
  4. Click the + button at the bottom of the main pane
  5. Name your new search template: “Tembo”
  6. Enter a template URL: “tmbo://search?searchString=*”

The template URL uses the asterisk as a placeholder for the text you will enter in LaunchBar. Following the above URL format you could set up several templates for frequent searches. E.g. a separate template to search MESSAGES.