Automating Slack status changes on macOS

In these days of everyone working from home, I really liked the approach to setting Slack status that Alex Hidalgo mentioned on Twitter:

Most of our company has adopted a simple system:
✅ = "working and in front of my computer".
❎ = "working but stepped away for lunch or a walk"
🛑 = "Done for the day, see you tomorrow!"

Setup aliases for them that start with "wfh" to make them easy to find. Works well!

— Alex Hidalgo (mostly on writing break) (@ahidalgosre) March 19, 2020

I wanted to be able to change status from Alfred. Turns out there’s a handy Applescript bundle by Sam Knight that makes this easy. Here’s how I do it:

tell script "Slack"
	focus workspace "Netflix"
	set status "online" with icon ":wfh-up:"
end tell

I couldn’t get Alfred to invoke this Applescript directly (I imagine it has something to do with Security settings in Catalina), so I saved it to a file (up.scpt), and then invoked it in a workflow as a bash script, where the command was:

osascript ~/dev/slack-automation/up.scpt

My Alfred Slack status workflow looks like this:

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