How do you use Bunch?

Bunch
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What are your most used, best, most creative uses of Bunch?

Help me find amazing Bunch workflows! I love the idea of Bunch, and how it works – I live in plain text.

And yet … I don’t use it much. I’m not sure if I’m just not consistent enough in how I work, or if it hasn’t quite clicked yet.

Particularly interested in people writing code, working with data, doing research on the web, taking notes or writing sentences and such.

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I’m also interested in how people use Bunch on a day to day. Hypothetically I like the idea of being able to launch a bunch of apps, have them automatically arranged how I like them (it seems Bunches works well with Moom), but in practice I guess I rarely ever close anything or shut down, and I make heavy use of spaces to split up applications.

Apologies for not having much to add, but I’m following the thread as well.

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All of my best, most shareable Bunches are included in the sample bunches in the docs, so I don’t have much to add here. But I am infinitely curious how people are using it, so please share!

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My setup is pretty simple at the moment, Home and Work. I have a bunch of standard apps I use when working and like to start them up with Bunch and more importantly when it comes to knocking off time, close them so I am not (too) tempted to just answer that last email…

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That is exactly what Bunch was originally intended to do!

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I have a work setup that lunches with Bunch on my main Mac Studio. I also have a Plex Bunch that launches on my 2010 Mac Mini (server).

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My most used Bunch is my “Morning” bunch, which I use to start my day, which is usually, but not always, in the morning.

I trigger it by pressing a button on an original iPad Air that is running TouchPortal, which triggers the Bunch on my Mac Studio. (The iPad Air is my “bunch of buttons” device.)

My set up has four monitors with ten spaces. I have some applications, such as Mail and Music, set to only open on a specific space. And I’ve set the applications that launch to do so around those ‘anchor’ apps. Thus I have Mail open and then I have Safari open, so that Safari is opened in the same space, but on a different monitor, as Mail. I had to play with delays to get this to work.

I use Moom and Stay to position windows. Alas, I fear Stay may be abondoneware, but it still works on Sonoma.

The applications that open are:

Mail
Safari
NetNewWire
Music
Messages
Calendar
Omnifocus
Carrot Weather

I also have shortcuts that turn on my desktop speakers and power to my work laptop.

Safari opens to the APOD.

And then based on the time of day it uses AppleScript to say “Good Morning | Good Afternoon | Good Evening” to let me know the Bunch has completed running.

Update: I continue to tweak my bunches. And for my Morning bunch I added a one line AppleScript to play a specific Music playlist, if the time of day is morning.

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I started a new job a couple of years ago, and needed to learn SQL. So I set up a Bunch to launch a set of applications and the folder of my files including:

BBEdit
Postrgres
Postico

Along with Safari to a web tutorial site for SQL.

I again used Moom to arrange the windows.

One click and I was ready to go. I didn’t have to invoke Alfred multiple times to launch the apps, nor navigate to the folder with my files, nor launch Safari and navigate to the tutorial site.

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