Author says Alfred is marginally better than Spotlight but I use it for so many different things. Doing quick math is a very common function for me. My favorite hidden trick is cmd+L which displays the typed text in HUGE fonts, so someone across the room can read it.
My most used Alfred things beyond launching apps/files:
* Clipboard history (screenshots on clipboard in the history is extra useful)
* Snippets using the date placeholders {datetime:short} for various file naming and email workflows
* Snippet shortcuts for things I always forget like the shortcut for → and ™ or my zoom meeting link that I paste into meeting invites
* Launching simple shell scripts by keyword
* Workflow for opening Jira tickets in my browser quickly
* Search notes workflow for quick access to everything in the Notes app
* Soulver workflow for using the Soulver engine in Alfred for doing quick calculations
I was a Quicksilver user that never quite got into Spotlight. I'm betting these days some of these workflows can be accomplished with Spotlight and other apps but Alfred has worked very nicely for me.
My man! I don't have much to add, your post mostly echoes what I do.
>* Clipboard history (screenshots on clipboard in the history is extra useful)
Indeed! As I mentioned elsewhere I've reversed the keyboard mappings for screenshots so that Shift+Cmd+4 copies to clipboard and Shift+Ctrl+Cmd+4 creates a file. Then I manage the images through the clipboard.
>* Snippets using the date placeholders {datetime:short} for various file naming and email workflows
>* Snippet shortcuts for things I always forget like the shortcut for → and ™ or my zoom meeting link that I paste into meeting invites
Yes, snippets are invaluable! I have tons of different ones, everything from various API keys, adding user accounts with SSH pubkey on Linux (while checking that password auth is off), outputting an ASCII guitar fretboard, setting up servers with nginx/php/mysql from scratch etc... Haven't actually looked into placeholders though, looks potentially useful although I can't think of a particular use case off the bat.
And everything synced through Dropbox of course.
>* Launching simple shell scripts by keyword
Yes! For example I often run "slack active" and "slack away".
>* Workflow for opening Jira tickets in my browser quickly
I do this as well! "<board> <ticketnumber>" opens them up directly in the browser that I use for work, i.e. "ticket 123" opens /browse/TICKET-123. Super convenient.
And for amusement I've created a couple of workflows to play different sounds, for dramatic and/or comedic effect.
And another workflow creates a new subdomain for a specific domain in Cloudflare.
Alfred is one of the main things that keep me from switching back to Linux.
Good list, and this reminded me to push an edit to add my favorite symbol shortcut which is option+2 for ™. I use Alfred for things like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" though. I also didn't know about the Soulver workflow, that might be enough to get me to buy Soulver.
Hopefully you don’t need Soulver open? Numi app workflow requires Numi to be fully open. I don’t know if Numi or Soulver are better otherwise. I have Numi via Setapp
A few tips for Spotlight that made me stop using apps like Quicksilver and Alfred:
1. Typing something and pressing CMD+B will open a browser and do a Google search for that
2. Typing math works now
3. You can change your Spotlight preferences to not include files you don't wanna search on, essentially always showing apps (if you just want it do be an app launcher)
Alfred does a lot more than this, but for me these were the key automation features I needed to stop using it.
Spotlight’s math support is very rudimentary. I think I even found a bug in it recently trying to use “1e9” scientific notation.
I’ve found Google has the best calculator feature, which supports complex unit-aware inputs like “6 gigabytes / (7.1 mb/sec)”. Even Wolfram Alpha seems to get confused with some simple inputs.
I reach for my physical calculator that is always with me. Seems weird as it's less convenient that using spotlight in the moment and larger than my iphone 11. Just never got out of the habit.
Is there a way to make the math layout in spotlight not take up so much space? When I am doing math it's typically reading numbers off the screen which are almost always covered by the dialog.
Yeah it bothers me too sometimes. You can use the mouse to drag it to a new location and it'll remember it. It will also snap to alignment points so it's easy to revert the location again.
Go to Accessibility settings and enable the zoom in shortcut. It lets you zoom in where the cursor is with a key press. Useful for checking small graphical details, reading tiny text and pointing something out to people. I use it all the time.
Yah it's perpetually on my todo list to learn to use Alfred for more things, like using its built in file browsing more. It would be nice to have Alfred workflows set up for more things like switching Chrome tabs and Discord channels.
I do use it a ton for launching apps and quick calculations, but Spotlight can do that with a bit less polish.
