What is Alfred?

I guess it makes sense that I describe what Alfred is if I’m going to telling you about how to write Workflow scripts for it too, right?

In it’s simplest terms, Alfred is an app for your Mac that allows you to launch application quickly. However that really only scratches the surface. I’ll give you a few examples of where I use Alfred every day (probably dozens of times a day… maybe even hundreds??):

• To open an app like Excel, ⌘+ [space], type “ex” and then [return]
• To jump into my customers folders, ⌘+ [space], type “cust” and then [return]
• To do a calculation, ⌘+ [space], type “67*.95” and the result displays on the screen
• To find a phone number, ⌘+ [space], type “surtee” and then [return], and to dial a number I just use [down] to get to their phone number and hit [return] and my phone starts dialling

I think you get the general idea. Everything in Alfred starts by using ⌘+ [space], however you can configure that to be whatever shortcut key you want.

The Launcher

The main purpose of Alfred is as a launcher, allowing you to launch applications quickly without having to take your hands off the keyboard. Alfred maintains an index of all of your applications so that you need only type the first couple of keys to open an application. Alfred also learns your habits so that if you regularly find and open a specific application it will start putting that at the top of the list as you type the first character.

When you launch Alfred (by pressing the short-cut key, in my case ⌘+ [space]) a small window pops up over the window you’re currently working in and allows you to start typing the name of the application you want to launch.

Searching for Files

Some of you may be asking “Isn’t ⌘+ [space] used for spotlight?”. And you’d be right, it normally is. Spotlight is the tool on your mac that you can use to find anything, files, emails, applications etc. So you can choose to either assign Alfred to the same key, replacing spotlight or assigning a different key combination to Alfred… or Spotlight for that matter.

There’s no need to use both Alfred and spotlight though as Alfred will do file searches in the same way, but give you more options. To search for a file:

1. ⌘+ [space] — Launch Alfred
2. [space] — Tells Alfred you’re doing a file search
3. type the words you want to search for

[caption id=”attachment_140" align=”aligncenter” width=”942"]

Short video/GIF using Alfred to do a file search[/caption]

Once you’ve found the file you need, hitting [return] will open that file. However if you want to do something different with the file like email it to someone, move it, copy it, etc then pressing [right] will give you a secondary menu allowing you to jump to the action you want to perform.

Clipboard History

Alfred is one of the first apps I install when i’m setting up a computer and one of the main reasons for that is the clipboard history tool. This gives you the ability to see and use not only what’s on your clipboard right now, but what you copy/pasted for the last day, week or month if you want.

I generally find this is one of the harder habits to change as it’s just a bit different to using the standard keyboard. To activate the clipboard history, you just copy as you would normally but instead of pasting using ⌘+ [v] you use a keyboard shortcut to pop up the history window. In my case it’s ⌘+⌥ + [v], then you can use the arrow keys to find what you need from your clipboard history. When you’ve highlighted what you want to paste, just hit [return] and you’re done. The content is pasted in where you would normally paste.

[caption id=”attachment_143" align=”aligncenter” width=”942"]

Use ⌘+ ⌥ + [v] to popup the clipboard history.[/caption]

Learning Alfred

My recommendation with a tool like Alfred is to move slowly. Install it and try using it for one specific purpose for a week, for example just use it to launch applications. Over time it will become second nature to you, and I think you’ll start looking for more things Alfred can do.

There’s plenty of tutorials available on the Alfred website also.