Hi I am new to Hook. I have played around with it for a few weeks and find it very useful. However, I would like to link several files together and tried to do so using the menu bar option. Nothing happens when I drag several files to the menu bar. Am I doing something wrong?
welcome to the Hook Productivity Forum, Jamie. And thanks for asking.
That should work.
If notifications are turned off you won’t get a notification. But the menu bar window should remain open for a moment and show you the result.
If you invoke Hook on one of the items, do you see the links?
You’ve probably seen this help page, but for everyone : Menu Bar Window – Hookmark
I don’t understand how this is supposed to work. Here’s what I was trying, maybe incorrectly.
I have three files.
A.png
B.png
C.png
I select “C.png”, click Hook, and Copy Link (command-c).
Then I select “A.png” and “B.png” at the same time. I click Hook and what I see is the name of the folder. So if I click Hook to Copied Links (command-v) what I have is “C.png” Hooked to the folder that all three files are in.
What I wanted is “C.png” Hooked to both “A.png” and “B.png”. I can do this one-by-one (C then Hook to A, then Hook B to C). Maybe what I thought would happen cannot happen?
Katie
Currently, Hook does not support Hook to Copied Link on multiple files. That’s been on the to do list for quite a while. We’ve been considering having a Finder extension like Dropbox provides.
However, the menu bar icon does allow you to create the type of network you want:
to hook C to both A and B
- drag C onto the menu bar icon.
- drag A and B to Hook’s menu bar icon
When you drop a single item onto Hook’s menu bar icon, Hook’s menu bar icon stores the item in the top menu bar window well. Then when you drop another item onto the menu bar icon, it links the top item to everything else. During this process, you can click on the menu bar icon to see the two wells. you can also clear the top well by clicking the “x” on it.
If you would like to hook many items together, you can instead of step 1 above, select them all and drop them all on the menu bar icon at the same time.
Some people like using the menu bar icon (I occasionally do). However, I realize that not everyone likes drag and drop (I normally prefer the keyboard to the mouse ; where possible). Moreover, some people don’t have enough space on their menubar to show the Hook icon.
When we add to Hook’s AppleScript dictionary a way to Hook items together, additional ways of quickly hooking multiple items together (whether they are files or not) will become possible.
Wow!
Enough said. This is more than perfect.
Thank you!
Katie
Maybe I need to clarify. When I select the items I want to link together, and begin dragging to the target (the menu bar) the menu bar does not reveal itself. That is what I mean “nothing happens” I should also say that I am dragging directly from DEVONthink - not sure if that matters. The items do not live close to one another in Finder so I am dragging from DT instead for ease.
So as an update to my previous post, seems the issue was a setting on my Mac; the auto hide/show menu bar. Needs to be deactivated. HOWEVER, when I drag multiple files to the menu bar icon (Hook) as you outline above, it does not link all the files together. It seems to randomly link some but not all. Some files are already linked to one another, but I wanted to expand the network. Didn’t seem to work as expected. Do I need to break the previous link and start from scratch?
That would the difference. When hooking DEVONthink items together via the menu bar icon, links are forged with Finder file urls, not with the DT URLs. (So if you use Reveal File in Finder, and invoke Hook, you’ll see the hooks are there.) Unless one wants to connect items that DEVONthink indexes, rather than has in its own database, that is probably not what one wants. I’ll see if we can get the DT URLs, otherwise I’ll update our DEVONthink integration page accordingly.
Right you are sir! I invoked finder and sure enough there they are. I guess one work around since I use DT extensively is to copy all links into one of the document. Thanks for your response. Very helpful
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I had really been hoping that a keyboard-based alternative to “Hook multiple items via menu bar icon” would come out with version 2.0. My use case is: run an advanced search in Finder, select the search results, and “hook” them together with a single keyboard shortcut. Boom. But I can’t seem to get it to work. Every time I have to use my mouse to drag the selected items onto the menubar icon, which always seems remarkably finicky (although it does work, and it’s magical!).
With the keyboard shortcuts for copying links without invoking the Hook window, nirvana seems close at hand:
- With a keyboard shortcut, run “Copy link” in the current item.
- Search in Finder for a set of related items, then select the relevant results
- With a keyboard shortcut, run “Hook to copied link” to create a web of bidirectional links between the selected items and the initial item.
If this is a feature request, I’d love to see it happen soon. If this is already possible, with keyboard commands, it would be great to know how to do it.
Agreed. Hook still doesn’t support multi-select in Finder. However, Hook has automation so we or others should be able to develop a goodie (script / app/ Finder service) to do this. It’s long been on our todo list. Sorry we haven’t delivered it yet.
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