OmniFocus 3 AppleScripts

About

This repository contains useful scripts for OmniFocus 3. I have also included a directory with some icons created from the FontAwesome set. I am planning to update this repository somewhat regularly as I write new scripts I find useful. Some scripts take inspiration and may be similar to the popular collection by Brandon Pittman.

Installation

Compile Script

I added a compiler script to simplify the installation process. This is the executable compile.sh script. You can just supply the directory with the script you wish to compile and it will compile it to either the OmniFocus script folder or the Script Library folder. Note that the compile.sh uses the com.omnigroup.OmniFocus3 folder, hence, if your script folder is different (for instance com.omnigroup.OmniFocus3.MacAppStore), you need to change the variable scriptfolder in the compile.sh file - it is located at the top of the script.

There is another library specifically for the interaction with the Timing app. This library is required by the script Start Task. To install this library, just run the script compile.sh with the option -t.

Make sure to install the Library script first - this library is used by most of the other scripts.

Example Usage (from the OmniFocusScripts folder):

To compile the library:

./compile.sh Library

To compile the library with the support for the Timing app (needed by the Start Task script):

./compile.sh -t Library

To compile the Duration script:

./compile.sh Duration

You can also see how to use the script compile.sh by running it with the -h option:

./compile.sh -h

Manually

You can also compile and install the scripts manually. Make sure that the library script is installed first.

To do that, compile the file omnifocuslib.applescript.Then, copy the compiled file omnifocuslib.scpt to the directory ~/Library/Script Libraries/. The Terminal commands to do that are

osacompile -o Library/omnifocuslib.scpt Library/omnifocuslib.applescript
cp Library/omnifocuslib.scpt ~/Library/Script\ Libraries/

To install one of the OmniFocus scripts, compile the script using osacompile and then copy it to the OmniFocus 3 script directory. To see what your script directory is, open OmniFocus 3 and navigate to Menubar -> Help -> Open Scripts Folder. Typically, this directory is either

~/Library/Application Scripts/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus3

or

~/Library/Application Scripts/com.omnigroup.OmniFocus3.MacAppStore

depending on how you purchased OmniFocus.

Configuration

There might be additional configuration steps. They are described either in a README of the script or in the next section of this README.

Scripts

1. Sort Tags: Define categories of tags and their priorities. Then, you can use the script to order your tags according to the priority of the category.

2. Defer: Defer all the selected tasks to tomorrow. This script can easily be modified to defer all the selected tasks to x days from today. Makes deferring much quicker and can be done in batch.

3. Edit Links: Edit displayed name of all links in notes of all selected tasks or projects. Useful if you often add links to your notes and do not want to manually edit their displayed name one by one.

4. Duration: Simple script that calculates the total duration of all selected tasks. This is useful when you have a project and want to quickly see what is the estimated duration. I also use this to see how long will it take to complete the tasks I scheduled for today. The script defaults to 15 minutes when duration is not set in OmniFocus. This can be changed in the duration.applescript file: change the argument of getDuration handle on line 6.

5. Start Task: This is a quite complex script. It is for people that are using the Timing app to track their time. This script takes the selected task in OmniFocus and checks if the project or action group the task belongs to is in Timing. If not, it then offers to add this project to Timing: It dutifully asks you for the parent project this new project should belong to, the color of the new project, and finally the productivity score of the project. The script also starts the Focus app if it is installed on your computer. This app blocks distracting websites and apps. Note: you need to have compiled the timinglibrary by running the script compile.sh with the -t option (see above).

6. Next to Front: This script adds the Forecast Tag as the primary tag of all selected actions. I wrote this because on iOS you can often only see 1 tag per action and it is important for me to see whether the action is tagged with the Forecast Tag. My forecast tag is "🗄Next", if you are using a different forecast tag (which is almost certainly the case), change the variable nextName in nexttofront.applescript.

Icons

To use the Scripts in OmniFocus, one typically adds a button for that script in the toolbar. OmniFocus uses the script's Finder icon for the script button. If you are using more than 1 script it can be difficult to distinquish them. Moreover, the default icon, in my opinion, looks boring. Hence, I have converted some FontAwesome icon to the macOS .icns format. The icons can be found in different colors using mostly the OmniFocus 3 dark color pallette. To use them, open the location of a script in Finder and open the Get Info window. Then, drag the .icns file to the script's icon in Info window.

You can see my OmniFocus toolbar with those icons used here:

The icon files can be found here.

Attribution

The icons are modified icons from the FontAwesome collection. The official website can be found here. There is also a Github repository.