Hello.
Back in 201x or so I installed the free version of Alfred and was very happy with it. But then came Spotlight and I used it more and more till I forgot that I had Alfred installed. Since 2020 I have a M1 Macbook Air and I never installed Alfred again. But there are some things that I miss. Like sending the macbook to sleep or ejecting stuff or the much better search.
Now I was wondering, are you using Alfred? And where is it better than Spotlight? I think about getting the Powerpack but I’m trying to figure out if I need it.
I already have Keyboard Maestro and it’s great but I use about 0.5% of its power. I was wondering if I should pay for Alfred and then it will just not be used as intended… because of habits or so.
Your use cases and experience might help me decide.
I bought Alfred “Mega Supporter” which is a lifetime license with Powerpack. I never use Spotlight because Alfred’s various searching capabilities are better. Other features I use:
Clipboard History
Snippets (I’ve deleted TextExpander)
Advanced Calculator
all of the system command shortcuts, like Sleep, Lock, Eject
Workflows. I’m using 8, 2 of which I wrote.
I also have Keyboard Maestro but found it too complicated to deal with.
I use both Alfred and Spotlight. Alfred is cmd + space and I use this 99% of the time, multiple times per day. I use it to launch apps, open folders or files, and some of the Powerpack features. Alfred is by far faster than any other launcher, including Spotlight.
But I still have ctrl + space set up for Spotlight for some uses cases - e.g. it’s good at searching text from photos, Apple Notes, and finding search terms within documents.
I had started this thread some time ago and it had some good engagement. It should give you great ideas about how MPUers are using Alfred like tools. I highly recommend Alfred.
I think you’d like Raycast, especially since you are (more or less) starting fresh. In some ways it’s far simpler than Alfred. In some ways it’s a lot more powerful. It’s a lot easier to setup and use. I love it.
I like Raycast, too. @johnkree should probably try both, because a lot of it comes down to personal preference.
I’d say the free version of Raycast, which gives you access to all the community extensions as well as the default ones, is better than the free version of Alfred. You really have to pay for the power pack for Alfred to be worth using.
Raycast also makes it very easy to export all your customizations, history, and extensions as an encrypted bundle and then import them to a fresh Raycast installation on a new Mac, so you can pick right up where you left off.
I had not even considered Photos and Notes being in Spotlight. I will have to set up Ctrl-Space and see if I can remember to use it when it might be useful.
That’s a good point on using Spotlight to search Notes and recognizing text in Photos. The nice thing about Spotlight is that you can check/uncheck what to be included in its search so I have unchecked spreadsheet, PDFs, presentations, folders, etc … in a way, then Spotlight will have limited search scope and can co-exist with Alfred. Thank you.
I’ve been an Alfred user for a couple of years now (because of this forum!). I use a lot of the things mentioned here (snippets, clipboard history in particular). I nearly only launch web searches from Alfred now (unless I’m already in browser at the time).
I think one thing I can’t see mentioned in this thread so far is that I also have workflows (Alfred term for automations) so that Alfred can open specific URLs and files on my Mac. This is so I can type a keyword in Alfred and it immediately opens the file/webpage I want. Super-useful if you have reference files/pages you access a lot during the week.
I’m interested in how @Topre and @zkarj are using Alfred for unit conversion, because I regularly need to convert acres to hectares (and vice versa) and I could not get Alfred to do it. There’s a workflow available for unit conversion but it didn’t include those units either. Please explain how you got yours running! I had an Apple Shortcut running for this for a while but it didn’t work very well (it was a clumsy implementation and never quite did what I wanted) so I’m back to doing this manually at the moment.
Mine is relatively simple. The key functionality is a script which I chose to write in PHP, but that’s not installed by default. You can, however, use any other scripting language and Javascript is built in so would be a decent choice.
In use, I invoke Alfred and type MM followed by the measurement in millimetres. When I press Enter, the result of the conversion is placed on the clipboard, and I have “Automatically paste to frontmost app” ticked on that clipboard block.
The net result is I can convert, say, 142mm into 5â…ť".
I am guessing your use case would be simpler as you’d probably not want fractions, just a decimal.
Thank you for sharing this. Turns out a workflow already exists for my use case, but it’s cool to see how others are using Alfred for more niche maths!
