Hazel is great for sorting through your files for you automatically, but it doesn’t provide much in the way of notifications to let you know it has done its job and that everything is working properly. However, with newer versions of Hazel, you can choose to “Send Growl Notification” as one of the options after an action is run.
You can optionally choose to keep the notification on the screen until clicked.
When you select this as an action, you will have the option to specify a pattern that Growl will then show in the form of a notification on your screen. Any text you type in this box will remain static (or appear the same) when the Growl notification is run. However, if you drag one of the four tokens to this text box, you will generate dynamic text whenever the Growl notification is delivered.
Currently, there are four different tokens:
File – Generate text for the name of the file being worked with
Time – Generates text for the current time
Rule – Generates text for the name of the rule being executed
Folder – Generates text for the name of the folder that the file was moved to
As an example, we created a Growl notification to remind us when our Amazon MP3 download (we created this rule in our "7 Awesome Hazel Rules" article) has started by typing in the following text into the pattern text box. We replaced the items in brackets with the tokens we dragged from the attributes section.
The MP3 download: [FILE] was started on [TIME] using Hazel rule [RULE]
The alert will appear on your screen whenever the rules are matched.
Follow this article's author, Cory Bohon on Twitter.
