497: Spotlight, Alfred & LaunchBar

Hi @Ajay (and bowline, thanks for the mention)! Pacmax.org maker here. I just came across this thread and wanted to chime in so everyone knows that I’ve got a Share page on the site—help me beef it up, if you like! I definitely don’t know all of the workflows out there, but I’m always surprised at how creative people can be when I discover new ones. The Alfred Forums are also a fantastic resource, I agree!

I’m pushing ~20+ more workflows this evening, so please check back again before long.

Thanks all, and thanks @MacSparky—long-time listener and fan; you actually turned me onto Alfred in the first place, I think.

:wave: All the best,
Max

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I have been using this Alfred email workflow for an entire 15 minutes now, and like it quite a bit. It is called email search, so it allows you to search by author, subject, attachment. But I am using it to compose emails. If you type em followed by a contact name, it will bypass the inbox and bring up a window to compose an email to that person.

Alfred Email Workflow

If you have the “allow phone calls in” your mac when your iphone is near, one neat thing to use Alfred is to make phone calls from your contacts list

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This sparked my interest in Remote some more. Going to give this a try! If anyone’s interested, I just created a set of icons to give my Alfred Remote a little bit of a refresher. I’m no designer, and the changes are subtle, BUT if you’re into that, here it is. :slight_smile:

Thanks, I just implemented this!

I’m probably just dense but I don’t see the value of using AR to activate Alfred on my Mac. It is just as easy (faster) to use the keyboard keywords. Now, if Alfred was avaiable for iOS that would be a different thing but to reach over to touch icons on my iPhone or iPad to launch Aflred on my Mac–why? I’m probably missing something here.

I’m interested in this because I’m not a 100% keyboard user, so having some buttons that clearly show what they are going to do just one stretched finger-tap away seems like an interesting idea.
Otherwise I’d need to move both my hands to the keyboard, activate Alfred, remember a command, type the command…not the worst thing in the world I know.

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Makes sense. Each of us our own habits and workflows. I try to keep my hands on the keyboard as much as possible on my Mac. Even on the iPad, I use the available keyboard shortcuts whenever they are available. :slight_smile:

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Thanks to this episode I’ve now downloaded, installed and configured Alfred 4 and am happily benefiting from its many features.

Is there a way to customize Alfred to search the Apple Support knowledge base?

Set up a custom web search with this URL:

https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&q={query}

And see also my posts here

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I am having trouble with LaunchBar - searching. I’m having trouble typing and searching it simply finds an app that starts with the latest letter I typed.

Haven’t used LaunchBar in a few years but what does Show Index look like?
Have you tried reindexing your drive or at least choosing Update Index?

Here is a video demonstrating the issue I’m having with LaunchBar. Please excuse the bad audio.

Is that just the way it works?

It should be a retype delay problem: in preference you can set after how long LB resets and “thinks” you’re typing a new search.

Try playing with the slider :smiley:

edit: probably it is useful to state that LaunchBar works in a way that does not allow to type more than one word, or to “pause” while typing as you can do with spotlight o Alfred (if I remember correctly). When I started using it I had similar problems and had to learn to type fasts the first relevant letters for the search.

I tried both LaunchBar and Alfred - uninstalled them both.

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Alfred is the first thing I install on a Mac. I have even installed it (with permission) to do 15 minutes of work on someone else’s computer. I just have to have the find/open/in search tools available to me. Spotlight results are too slow and fuzzy for my taste. I don’t have a lot of power ups, but I heavily use what I have installed to paste time stamps, generate passwords, paste lorum ipsum text, and do some light text expansion for frequently accessed codes and phrases. And I’m slowly expanding that list, but I’m careful not to load in a bunch of features I rarely use because the uncertainty about what’s possible slows down my thinking when I hit opt+space for some reason.

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Here is what I tried to do with each:

Alfred - I did a search for a specific file, it couldn’t find it and kept wanting to send me to Google to do a web search. I knew the file was there because of Spotlight.

LaunchBar - When trying to type a search query, it simply finds an app whose name starts with the most recent letter I typed. It drove me crazy! I posted a video showing it, earlier in this thread (excuse the bad audio). The end result was that I couldn’t get to the file I wanted.

It was a bad experience with both apps. Can you believe that I had my credit card ready to buy one of them? In the end, I guess I’m sticking with good old Spotlight.

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Did you type find or open before you typed the file name in Alfred? It uses Spotlight’s index, so the results should be the same.

What kind of file were you searching for?

Alfred’s Default Results include the most essential file types; Applications, System Preferences, Contacts, and any file types you’ve added.

When you need to expand your search scope beyond these core file types included in Alfred’s results, the File Search keywords are here to help you.

A video file that’s on my system.