refreshing aliases on demand

[incanus]

I'm trying to do this specifically with the AeroSpace menu bar item, but the idea applies to any alias in SketchyBar.

I've added an alias for the item to SketchyBar and it shows up fine. However I can never get it to refresh more often than once per second, which feels like a delay for this use case.

I've tried registering an event subscription for the item, then changing any property in the click that is called, but it is not refreshed. I've tried triggering a sound play to make sure that things are getting called and that is called immediately, so I know the handler is working.

It seems I just can't find a way to force a refresh of the alias mirroring. Is there a way?

[FelixKratz]

You are correct in your analysis that there is currently no way to force a refresh of an alias. We could of course allow this to be possible. What would be your idea on how to address an alias to do the refresh?

[brianwk]

@FelixKratz edit: Actually figured this out that I can do --set Brain.fm update_freq=0.5. How embarassing, that's what I get for using GPT for solutions instead of my noggin! Actually, I'm not sure if it works any different. My Python script timer seems to be ahead of the alias timer even after I change the update_freq Okay I now understand that update_freq is an option, however you can only set it to an integer and not to a value like 0.5 like other items. My use case (displaying a timer) requires it to refresh quicker than 1 second. Thoughts?

I use an app called Brain.fm, I made a Python script to put the timer into the SketchyBar. However, I would prefer to use the alias feature. However, the timer is off by a second because it only seems to update every second. The update_freq setting doesn't seem to apply to the alias from my limited trial test. Perhaps the process of aliasing the item is taking longer than 1 second? Not sure!

Loving SketchyBar, I was up all night setting it up because I finally caved!

I added the script I used to add the Brain.fm timer to SketchyBar here: https://github.com/brianwk/sketchy-brain.fm -- not sure if someone will find it useful and it's not very fleshed out yet and very specific to my setup currently.