Alfred Made Me Fall in Love with the Mac!
Learn why every Mac user must use Alfred
I am a Linux person and for some reason, I find the Mac UI clumsy and hard to manage. Then I discovered Alfred which honestly changed my life and there is not a single day where I don’t use Alfred and now I can’t move away from Mac because there is no Alfred in other operating systems!
That’s enough of the back story now let me tell you why I love Alfred.
What is Alfred?
Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.
Here are the key features that Alfred provides to make you more efficient while using Mac.
1. Simplified File Search
The Quick Search feature of File Search is one of my favorite commands which helps me find a file just by typing a single quote: ‘ and the file name. We can also use wildcard matching with this. After this feature, I never use Finder to locate my files.
2. Web Bookmarks
Web bookmarks connect with your default browser and help in searching them using Alfred. Before Alfred, I never used bookmarks. Alfred helps in searching through my bookmarked items and hence saves a lot of time.
Now I bookmark almost every website which I visit frequently.
The image below is an example of how I use Web Bookmarks. I save everything which I access frequently eg. My one-on-one notes with my manager, my resume, Linkedin bookmarks, etc.
4. Clipboard History
Having the history of my clipboard just a hotkey away is like a boon. I can save a lot of time with this.
Alfred’s clipboard history is extra good because you can search by just partially typing the text. The copied text is stored for 3 months and the search results come in descending order.
We can also merge copies by holding the cmd button and tapping C two times. You can also decide what type of delimiter you want to keep between two copies.
You can also access snippets through a clipboard where you can store most commonly used data, like addresses, etc.
3. Web Search
One other way by which we can save time is by directly searching a website from Alfred.
If you see the image below Alfred is configured to search for a query on multiple websites including Google, Linkedin, Google Drive, Gmail, Twitter, Amazon, Youtube, etc.
Why does this save time? Because you don’t have to switch your window to the browser, then open a new tab and type your query. These are multiple steps! These steps can be reduced to 1 or 2 steps using Alfred. In the image below we are just typing “youtube Corey Schafer” and then press enter and the search results are opened in the browser and website of your choice.
5. Workflows
Workflows are one of the most powerful features of Alfred where you can customize and create your workflows to complete certain tasks or actions. Eg. If you want to open three applications with just one command, you can do that.
You can also download already existing workflows created by the community.
The image below shows how I search for emoji’s after adding Emoji Search Alfred workflow.
I have also created a timer workflow for myself which starts when I run the command: timer <time in minutes> and then show a notification once the time duration completes.
Conclusion
As you can see in the image above I use Alfred multiple times everyday.
Alfred has changed the way how I use Mac. It has helped me in reducing mouse usage and I feel more productive overall. It has also made using Mac a lot of fun.
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