Scheduling Bunches

• Available Keys
• Schedules, Screensavers, and Sleep
• Open at intervals
• Close After an Interval
• Daily Schedules
  • Opening Daily
  • Closing Daily
• Weekly Schedules
  • Opening Weekly
  • Closing Weekly
• Natural Language Dates
• Cancelling an Automatic Launch or Close
• Selectively Scheduling on Synced Macs

Available Keys

You can use Bunch like an alarm clock or timer by making use of some frontmatter keys in your Bunch files.

Bunch will always read in these keys and set the alarms and timers when it launches, so it doesn’t matter if you quit the app in between scheduled launches.

Bunches with active schedules will have a timer icon after their title in the menu.

Tip: By default, Bunches that are already open will ignore a scheduled open, and Bunches that aren’t open will ignore a scheduled close. You can override this and have them open or close anyway by using the ignores state: true frontmatter setting.

Schedules, Screensavers, and Sleep

Bunches scheduled to open or close automatically will work while the screensaver is running or the display is asleep, but will not wake the display or stop the screensaver.

If your Mac is asleep at the scheduled time, it will run when the machine wakes. Bunch will not wake your machine automatically.

Open at intervals

The open every key runs the Bunch at timed intervals. The value should be shorthand for hours and minutes to create an interval: 1h30m would run it every hour and a half. You can also just use 1h or 30m.

You can also use “d” to specify days. If you want to launch every other day, use “2d”. This, however, does not allow you to specify a time. So, for most intents and purposes you’ll want to use open at.

It will even let you do seconds (s), if you needed to.

---
open every: 1h30m
---

This can be useful for always-open Bunches, though it can be disruptive if launching apps and opening files takes window focus from what you’re working on. This is most useful for small Bunches that use things like Spotlight searches to open files, allowing them to be continually updated.

Close After an Interval

The close after key defines an interval to wait after opening the Bunch before automatically closing it. It uses the same formatting as open at, e.g. a time string like 1h30m or 1d. This will just start a background timer that will automatically close the Bunch after it’s been open for that period of time.

Closing the bunch manually will cancel the timer. If Bunch is quit, the timer will be lost and reset when the Bunch is opened again (even if it’s restored at launch).

Tip: Keep in mind that you can use % before app names to ignore them when closing. That means your Bunch can do things like turn on Do Not Disturb or toggle Dark Mode and then restore settings after a set period of time. Combine with an open option to toggle things on and off at set intervals. Apps that are already open will be unaffected by Bunch opens.

Daily Schedules

The “at” commands trigger daily.

Opening Daily

The open at key creates a daily “alarm” that will go off at the same time every day, as long as Bunch is running.

---
open at: 5pm
---

Time can be specified with a meridian (am/pm) or as 24 hour time. Whatever time it initially goes off, it will then start repeating at 24 hour intervals. If Bunch isn’t running when the time comes, it will not launch automatically again until the next day.

Multiple times can be listed, separated by commas. To have a Bunch launch at 8am, Noon, and 5pm, use:

---
open at: 8am, 12pm, 5pm
---

Closing Daily

You can also use close at to close a Bunch at a set time each day. open at and close at can be used simultaneously. Close at uses the same syntax as open at.

Weekly Schedules

The “on” commands trigger weekly, multiple days are allowed.

Opening Weekly

You can specify a day of the week and a time to create weekly Bunches, great for end-of-the week reviews, or celebrating the weekend by shutting down Slack.

---
open on: friday 5pm
---
!Slack

Multiple days can be listed with a time, separated by commas. Only one time can be used per group of days, but you can repeat the list. To open at different times on Tuesday and Thursday than on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, use:

---
open on: MWF 8am, TTh 9am
---

Days can be just initial letters or spelled out or abbreviated day names. Single letters can be compressed, longer day names should be separated by spaces. In single-letter form, Thursday must have an “h” and Sunday must have a “u”, e.g. ‘Th’ and ‘Su’. “T” alone triggers Tuesday, and “S” alone triggers Saturday.

To open at two different times on the same day, repeat the day block with a second time:

---
open on: MWF 8am, MWF 12pm
---

Closing Weekly

You can also use close on to close a Bunch weekly at a set day and time. open on and close on can be used simultaneously.

Close on uses the same syntax as open on.

Tip: You can always see what the next scheduled event for a Bunch is by hovering over it in the menu. A tooltip will show up displaying the time of the next scheduled open or close event.

Natural Language Dates

All of the scheduling keys (other than open every) allow natural language dates and times. You can just write 1pm or tue noon and it should figure out what you’re trying to do. You can view the Console to see the confirmation that scheduling is happening. I don’t currently offer a front-end way to see what all is scheduled, but I’d like to eventually.

Cancelling an Automatic Launch or Close

When launching and closing Bunches on a schedule, Bunch will attempt to show a notification 15 seconds before the action happens. Clicking the notification will cause it to the action to happen immediately, and there’s a cancel button to skip that scheduled launch until the interval comes around again. This notification system is only tested on Big Sur. I highly recommend setting Bunch’s notification style to “Alert” in System Preferences, they work much better for what Bunch uses them for.

Selectively Scheduling on Synced Macs

If you sync your Bunches to multiple Macs, you may want to be selective about which ones get scheduled. There are two keys that can help with this.

First, schedule if: accepts either a UUID or a logic condition. Because these conditions run before the Bunch actually executes, some logic comparisons may not work as usual. The safest ones are UUID and file [PATH] exists to use a file as a trigger file.

A UUID is a unique identifier for each Mac. You can get the UUID for the current machine by opening Preferences and pressing “Copy UUID.” The value of startup if: can be a single UUID, or multiple UUIDs separated by commas.

---
title: Only on my iMac
open at: 7:30am
schedule if: C6766848-065C-51F8-B2EE-3A9DA8A10017
---

Second, schedule unless: takes the same parameters as schedule if: but has the reverse effect. If a condition returns true, scheduling is ignored. If it returns false, scheduling is enabled.

A Bunch this is removed from the menu by an “ignore if” or “ignore unless” frontmatter key will also not be scheduled.

---
title: But not when...
open at: 7pm
schedule unless: file ~/trigger.txt exists
---

Schedule conditions are only parsed when your Bunches are scanned. This happens when a file in the Bunch folder changes, but not when a trigger file or other condition changes. If a Bunch is already loaded and scheduled, the change in presence of a trigger file or other condition will not immediately turn off scheduling, but the schedule if/unless condition will be checked at the scheduled time and open/close will be cancelled based on the result.

The schedule if/unless keys can be inherited from tag and folder frontmatter. If the Bunch contains its own schedule if or schedule unless, it will override any schedule conditions set in inherited frontmatter. If a Bunch inherits a schedule condition but doesn’t have a schedule to set, the key will be ignored.

If (for whatever reason) both schedule if and schedule unless are defined on a Bunch, only schedule if is used.