Tembo implements a custom URL scheme. Use this to start searches from third party tools like Alfred, Butler, or LaunchBar.
Tembo 2.0 search URLs have the following format:
tembo2://search?query=[QUERY]&location=[LOCATION]&group=[GROUP]
Such URLs can be invoked by any application, browser, launcher, script, etc. In this article we will look at setting up a custom search in Alfred.
Example:
tembo2://search?query=Houdah%20Software&location=~/Documents&group=PDF
The above link starts a Tembo search in the Documents folder for PDF files related to “Houdah Software”.
The text to search for is provided by the query parameter.
The optional location parameter specifies the folder path where you want to search. This parameter can be repeated to search multiple folders at once. You can use “~” to refer to your home directory. For example, “~/Documents” refers to your Documents folder.
Possible values for the optional group parameter are:
APPLICATIONS, BOOKMARKS, CONTACTS, DIRECTORIES, CALENDAR, EVERNOTE, FONTS, IMAGES, MESSAGES, MOVIES, MUSIC, PDF, SOURCE, SYSTEM_PREFS, XML
Set up a Web Search to start a Tembo search with text you enter in Alfred:
- In Alfred, go to “Features” > “Web Search”
- Create and name a new “Custom Search” (UTF-8)
- Set the “Search URL” to “tembo2://search?q={query}” (without the quotes)
- Optionally, add location and group parameters
The template URL uses {query} as a placeholder for the text you will enter in Alfred. Following the above URL format you could set up several templates for frequent searches. E.g. a separate template to search MESSAGES.
Spaces and special characters in the URL parameters need to be encoded (see w3schools.com). The URL encoding for the space character is %20. Your launcher may do this for you on the query, but you will need to provide encoded values for the other parameters.