Video Description

Learn how to make your first Hazel rule.

Video Transcription

Alright, so here we are in the Desktop. I've got a PDF. We're going to go into a lot of details about how to use Hazel throughout this course. But before we do so I thought it would be fun just to make a rule, so you can just kind of get your feet wet and see how something goes that you could do this along with me on your screen at home. Just get any PDF file and put it on your Desktop. 

And with Hazel, there's this three-column layout. The first column is these folders. The second is the rules that apply to the folders. And the third has the details. And we're on the Desktop now, so that's already selected. 

As you unpack Hazel and install it for the first time, it's going to have some Desktop Rules. To add a new folder, all we have to do is hit the little plus (+) button here. And you can choose a folder anywhere on your Mac. I'm going to actually create a folder on the Desktop, I'm going to call this PDFs. Hit create. And you'll see now on my Desktop, I've created a folder called PDFs. 

So what I'd like to do is ... let's just do a couple things. First, we're going to move this Coyote Agreement into the PDFs folder. So we're going to select the Desktop. And we're going to create a new rule. So I hit this little button, Create a new rule. And the new rule will say, move to ... Move PDF to Folder. And this rule is going to look at conditions. All automation is really an if statement followed by an action. If it is this, then do that. And this first section here is the if. So rather than looking at a name, we're going to look at the type. But you can see there's a lot of ifs here, and I'm going to cover all this throughout the video. But, like, you can do it based on the name or the current time or the date the file was added or the contents. We're going to use Kind. So if the Kind is. And then once again, you've got a bunch of options, a document, a folder, text, PDF, movie music image. It just goes on. But we're gonna pick PDF. So if it is a PDF, that's the if, what are we going to do with it? Well, we're going to move it. So we've already got the command we want. 

But there's a whole bunch more. And again, this is just an overview, we're gonna get into the details later. 

We're going to move it to a folder. I'm going to click Other.... And then I'm going to just go to my Desktop here, and say select that PDFs folder that we created. So if it's PDFs, move it in the folder. So we're going to take this file and put it right there. 

So I click Open. And then we can add an additional rule by hitting the plus (+) button. And I'm going to add a notification just for fun. So it's going to give a notification that says, "PDF moved." Alright, so that's the first thing we're going to do. I'll go ahead and click Save. 

You'll see the name applied. And now Hazel's running. It's going to be keeping an eye on that Desktop. And if it sees a PDF, it's going to move into the PDFs folder. So it's not immediate, because Hazel doesn't run all of your system resources at all times. But within a minute, Hazel is going to check the Desktop to see, is there anything there that's a PDF? And if it does, it's going to move it in. And you can see it just did that for me. So now if I open up that folder, you can see there's the Coyote Agreement in the PDF folder. 

Let's do one last thing. We're going to add another folder. And this time, we're going to select the PDFs folder. Click Open. And you can see we got it now in that first column. And we're going to just apply a rule that says, "Tag PDF." So we'll say Tag PDF. And I'm going to ... whoops. I'm going to say any file that comes into this folder, so it's any file, we're going to set a tag. Add tags. And the tag will be called PDF. And then Save. And now we're done. 

So I've created a rule inside the PDFs folder that anything that gets put in there, we're going to assume it's a PDF, because it has to be to get in that folder. And it's gonna be tagged as a PDF. 

So we'll go ahead now and open this folder. And there's that Coyote Agreement. And let's see if it's been applied yet. I'm going to right-click on that. And there you see it's got the PDF tag applied. Usually takes about a minute for these rules to run. So if you look for immediate results, you might want to wait. Be a little more patient. You can force the rules to run by right-clicking on the folder and just say Run Rules Now. 

Either way, there are some very quick and basic Hazel rules in action. As you can see, we're only in the third video, and it's not that difficult to run this app. And it's super powerful. 

Now let's dig in.