How to enable Alpha Services ? Services are features exported by an application for the benefit of other
applications. Alpha currently provides two services called
New Alpha Document With Selection
Open Selected File in Alpha
Services are found in the Services menu of most applications. For
instance, Mail, Safari, Firefox have a Services menu (located in the application's menu, like Mail ↣ Services).
Answer
In order to use the services provided by Alpha, you must make sure they are
activated at the system level. Open the Shortcuts panel of the Keyboard System Preferences panel. In the
list on the left choose Services, then in the list of services
displayed on the right, find the Alpha services and make sure the
corresponding check boxes are checked.
How do the services work ?
Say you are reading a mail in Mail.app and want to create a new
document in Alpha containing some portion of text, you must first select
the text, then open the Mail ↣ Services menu and choose
New Alpha Document With Selection. If no text is selected, the
service will not appear in the menu.
If you select a piece of text which may be interpreted as a full
file path (like /path/to/some/file or ~/some/file), then
you may choose Open Selected File in Alpha in the Mail ↣ Services menu to ask Alpha to attempt to open this
file.
Troubleshooting
If you activated the Alpha services and still they do not appear in the
Services menu of some other application, there are several possible
explanations :
Alpha must be in the Applications folder (or in a subfolder thereof)
for the system to detect the provided services.
the list of available services on the computer is built each time a
user logs in. If you installed a new version of Alpha, you might need to
log out and log back in before the service becomes available.
services are contextual so in some cases they do not appear simply
because they do not apply. For instance, the Open Selected File in
Alpha will be available only if the current selection is a file path.
