Use Keyboard Shortcuts to Log In to Your Salesforce Orgs

Cutting to the Chase: You can download the workflow here (requires Alfred plus Powerpack). You can get the latest version of Trapdoor here.

If you're a Salesforce developer, you're undoubtedly juggling scores of login credentials for the orgs you deal with on a daily basis. And if you develop on a Mac, you're certainly familiar with Trapdoor. If you're not familiar with it, you should be. It's awesome, and besides, it's required for the methods in this post to work. Basically, Trapdoor is a container for all of your login credentials to your Salesforce orgs. It provides a nice menu from which to choose orgs to log in to.

Even Trapdoor starts to get cumbersome when dealing with a whole lot of orgs, though. Scrolling the dozens or even scores of credentials, trying to find the exact one can take some effort. Plus, it's very mouse intensive.

Maybe you're also familiar with Alfred. It's a keyboard launcher, similar to the classic Quicksilver app. Alfred is far more robust than the term “keyboard launcher” implies, so I encourage you to read more about it.

One of the really great features of Alfred is workflows. (Workflows are part of the “Powerpack“, a paid, and totally worth it, upgrade.) Again, read more about them, but workflows allow you to assign keywords to scriptable actions.

I've written an Alfred workflow that works with the latest version of Trapdoor (thanks to Simon Fell for merging my pull request implementing AppleScript support in Trapdoor!) to allow a developer to search all of the saved credentials, and login to a selected org, straight from the keyboard!

You can download the workflow here (again, requires Alfred plus Powerpack). You can get the latest version of Trapdoor here. Once you've installed everything, invoke Alfred with your shortcut, then type “sfl” (for Salesforce login) to start finding the org to which you want to log in.