Fuzzy searches everywhere

It’s become a habit with me to find things quickly by doing (fuzzy) searches - so fewer keyboard shortcuts to remember and still faster than reaching for the trackpad/mouse. Examples:

  1. Typinator snippets and Keyboard Maestro macros - frequently get triggered by search. I even throw in keywords in Typinator expansions (within comments) so I can find them even when I only approximately remember what the snippet was about.

  2. Items in menus - I use an Alfred workflow to search items in menus, or even the Cmd+? shortcut that brings up the menu search option that’s built in. If it wasn’t so cranky I would use this app called “Option Space” a lot more - it even indexes services and bookmarks in my browsers so I can quickly go to a bookmark or trigger a service with it.

  3. Window management - used to use optimal layout and have switched to contexts - same premise - find windows by app name or window title quickly by searching, a lifesaver when I have a lot of stuff open. Related: I setup Contexts to only bring up windows in the current space when I’m cycling through the list by Cmd+` or Cmd+Tab, so - my setup is two spaces (effectively) + a bunch of fullscreen apps (Things, Fantastical, the usual suspects!). I think of the two spaces as a working space and a rough space, and when I’m in the working space I only see the apps that are relevant when I Cmd+Tab, which is really nice - I can pretend to be a minimalist with open apps without invoking quit-all every so often. :slight_smile:

  4. Switching tabs in Chrome: the gleebox extension lets me navigate across tabs by searching tab titles.

  5. Finding files: Alfred with some handy workflows for narrowing search scopes (typically, within a particular folder).

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