Triggers Panel

Arming a Flow

To activate a flow's trigger, toggle the enable switch inside the flow builder. This arms the flow, meaning Watchflows will begin monitoring for the trigger event in the background.

You can also arm or disarm a flow directly from the home page by right-clicking on a flow card and selecting the enable or disable option from the context menu. This is useful for quickly toggling flows without opening the builder.

All Triggers Toggle

The All Triggers toggle in the home page toolbar lets you pause and resume all armed flows at once. When you turn off the global toggle, every active trigger is suspended. Turn it back on, and all previously armed flows resume monitoring immediately. Arming any flow from its canvas while triggers are globally paused also turns global triggers back on — all other enabled flows re-arm at the same time.

This is helpful when you need to temporarily silence all automations without disarming each flow individually, for example during a presentation or focused work session.

Active Triggers Sidebar

The left sidebar displays all currently armed flows under the Active Triggers section. Each entry shows the flow name along with a brief summary of the trigger type, so you can see at a glance what automations are running.

Flows that belong to a folder display a small colored dot next to their name, matching the folder's accent color. This makes it easy to visually group related triggers by their folder.

Trigger Types

Watchflows supports a variety of trigger types that monitor different events on your Mac:

• File Changed — Fires when a specific file is created, modified, or deleted.
• Directory Changed — Fires when any file within a watched directory changes.
• Schedule — Fires on a recurring time interval or at a specific date and time.
• Clipboard — Fires whenever the system clipboard content changes.
• App Event — Fires when a specific application launches, quits, or becomes active.
• Webhook — Fires when an HTTP request is received at a unique local endpoint.
• System Event — Fires on system-level events like wake from sleep, network change, or display sleep.
• Device Event — Fires when external devices are connected or disconnected.
• Keyboard Shortcut — Fires when a user-defined global hotkey is pressed.
• Calendar — Fires when a calendar event starts, ends, or is approaching.

Background Execution

Armed flows run continuously in the background, even when you are not viewing them in the app. Watchflows monitors all active triggers and executes their workflows whenever a matching event occurs.

Every execution is logged and appears in the Recent Activity section of the sidebar. You can review the execution history to see when each flow ran, whether it succeeded, and what data was processed.