Early access and Alfred / Spotlight / LaunchBar (3rd party search integration)

Hello HRD,

You're right, it's been a month since I posted an update so it's a good time to bring us all up to date.

For details on "Why?" the fundamentals of my previous comment remain the same. The 448 words there explain the why thoroughly and I don't see me being able to best them today. 🙂

As for an update on where we're at, there are some really cool developments I'm excited to share.

Earlier this week we launched our 1Password Developer Tools. With this 1Password now includes full support for SSH keys and has made tremendous improvements to the command line interface (CLI) tool. You can check out our SSH and Git, meet 1Password and Your CLI wish is our command announcement posts for full details.

The part of this announcement that's super relevant here is the CLI op tool. It unlocks a wealth of potential as it's a full blown CLI that allows you to do everything that 1Password does. From the blog post op allows you to:

1. Invite and confirm new users 💌
2. Integrate with your identity provider using SCIM Bridge 🌉
3. Deploy secrets to production environments with Secrets Automation 🔐
4. Share items with your team or externally with secure share links 🤗
5. Create, read, update, and delete items, vaults, or documents 🌈

With this wide ranging functionality, apps like Alfred, Raycast, LaunchBar, Keyboard Maestro, or any other 3rd party app that would like to integrate with 1Password can use op to provide any piece of functionality they can dream of.

Using op gives apps so many more integration possibilities now that they can drop the shackles of relying on plain-text metadata files, which was the limit of what we were willing to provide in 1Password 7 as these files were unencrypted. And honestly, the titles and URLs were already too much imo and that's why we disabled this feature by default and hid the option under the Advanced Preferences.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what app developers do with op. In time we'll all be seeing some sweet integrations and workflows that will blow us away.

Now to be clear, this is going to take time. App developers have their own schedules and op was built first and foremost as a CLI tool so the ergonomics of the commands are not tailored specifically for development teams. Still, the functionality is there and available to use.

Since this will take time for everyone involved, I toyed around with a new open source project that uses op to export the same metadata that Alfred and others have been using for their existing integration. I dubbed it opbookmarks and you can grab it from GitHub here. It's meant as a stepping stone for apps to use until they have time to take things further with direct integration.

For anyone who would like to help test this it would be very helpful to see if opbookmarks is able to export your metadata and to get some performance metrics for your setup. I found opbookmarks to work quite well for my smaller accounts but ran into troubles for my multi-thousand item accounts and it was especially slow for my AgileBits account where I have hundreds of vaults. This is something we're looking into optimizing by exposing more of the internal APIs 1Password is relying on today for it's blazingly fast sync performance.

It's important to note that even though the exported data format matches that used by 1Password 7, the commands used to open items in 1Password 8 and the browser have changed. I have reached out to Alfred and LaunchBar to give them a heads up and to ask them to use the new commands. They have been receptive and I suspect we'll see some updates from them in the future with support for 1Password 8 and opbookmarks.

One of the things I like about Raycast is I can create my own extensions using React so I went ahead and created another open source project for a Raycast 1Password extension that relies on opbookmarks. Here it is in action:

https://github.com/dteare/raycast-1password-extension/blob/main/media/raycast-1password-extension.png

The Raycast 1Password extension works with 1Password 8 and the brave of heart are welcome to try it in their development environment. I have a pull request open to add 1Password 8 to the Raycast Store and once accepted it will be much easier to use. Until then you need Node installed and to follow the Raycast extension development instructions.

Clearly things are still under active development and a lot of work remains so please only jump in if you enjoy this kind of stuff, but I wanted to share a detailed update on where we're at.

Take care and if you do take things for a spin please let me know how it turns out.

++dave;
1Password Founder