What are /r/Alfred's favorite Products & Services?

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Alfred is still very much in active development, as mentioned by /u/rubys_eleven, and the community is continuing to grow. :)

Workflows are a great way to make your own work day run more smoothly, so they're intrinsically quite personal; I have dozens that wouldn't necessarily be useful for someone else, but make my day vastly more efficient.

You'll find great publicly-shared workflows on GitHub, Alfred Forum and Packal*, but it's also worth taking a look at the built-in examples, as well as creating your own (e.g. file filters, list filters, etc, can be so useful at speeding up repetitive tasks)

[* As mentioned by others, Packal is a user-run website, and this previously very active Alfred user has now moved on to a new job, etc, and no longer maintains Packal. We have plans for the future, but at this time, I'd really recommend joining our friendly community on the forum. If you're still having issues joining, pop us an email by replying to your license email and I'll help you sign up :)]

Beyond workflows, it's also worth taking a look at Clipboard History, Text Expansion, Custom Searches and all other features that make you more productive and save you menial tasks. Alfred's features are growing with every update, and we've got some great stuff planned still for the future!

Cheers, Vero (Alfred co-founder)

Here's how you can change the default fallback searches, if you're a Powerpack user: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/default-results/fallback-searches/

Otherwise as suggested by others, you can type "duck" to use the built-in web search. :)

Why don't you use the built-in hotkey to pop directly the clipboard history list? I think by default its: CMD+ALT+C

You can have a look here to have a better view of the feature and how to assign your hotkey https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/clipboard/

From Alfred’s website:

• Use the "open" keyword to open a file (or press the spacebar as a shortcut!)
• Use the "find" keyword to reveal the file in Finder
• Use the "in" keyword to search inside your files' content

As always with Alfred, you can customize these keywords in the settings.

Source: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/file-search/

It depends on what you want to do. Your best bet is read the documentation of the new workflow objects and the updated workflow objects.

I don't see any big breakthrough in workflow development. My preferred new object is the [Split Utility](https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/utilities/split-arg/).

Imho, the best improvements in workflow development lie in the debugger.

“For your security, Alfred doesn't listen for characters typed when you are in a secure text field, such as a password field, so he won't expand a text snippet in a secure field.”

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/snippets/

It can't do what you're asking (well, without the scripts people have already mentioned), but if you aren't already familiar with Automator, it's pretty cool.

https://support.apple.com/guide/automator/welcome/mac

You're looking for the built-in Amazon Suggest and Google Suggest workflows. Here's how you can install them (they require a Powerpack license) :)

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/templates/#suggest

If you're seeing some red x's in the File Troubleshooter, it's a sign that the file isn't properly indexed by macOS's metadata index. Manually locating the file in Finder and opening makes macOS index it on the spot.

You would likely benefit from rebuilding your Mac's index:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/indexing/#rebuild

I’ve not tried this but how about adapting this File Filter?

This example only looks for .pdfs in Documents. But you could change the first step to look for only contact files and in the second step, change the Scope to be wherever the contacts are stored. Presumable somewhere in the User Library.

I don’t actually know if the contacts are stored as individual files or if they’re in a bigger, single file. If it’s the latter, I guess that this would fail

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/inputs/file-filter/

Here's my list of my favorite Alfred workflows, and a bunch of others that I have bookmarked - https://www.notion.so/shayonpal/Alfred-Workflows-e40619e646894d45a85edeaffe632f3c

Hey thanks! I appreciate that and forgot I posted. So I sort of figured that out on my own, I wasn’t positive Alfred didn’t cause it but I thought it magnified the issue. I figured out how to fix it like you said, although a simple restart didn’t fix it. It dawned on me I had this problem once in the last a year or two ago maybe and I started to think about how I fixed it, which led me to my allocations and re-discovering Onyx. I used it to repair start permissions and rebuild the spotlight directory. It fixed it, although spotlight can’t find most of the stuff on two of my externals now but it’s probably just a matter of time for that. If you don’t have it check it out it’s freeware and great. https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

Thanks!

It's likely a hotkey conflict, so take a look at these areas of macOS that may be reserving Cmd + Space for something else. Once you've changed or disabled those, the issue you're seeing should go away :)

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/cmd-space/

Are you referring to a workflow keyword? You'll need to set your keyword object to "no argument" if you don't want Alfred to wait for an argument (e.g. a search term) to be provided.

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/inputs/keyword/

I'm not sure I'm understanding your response fully, but it sounds like you've setup snippets, but they're not auto-expanding when you type the snippet's keyword. I would read this support page and make sure you followed each step, especially the "Auto expansion allowed" checkbox.

If you open Alfred preferences and view the Snippets UI, is there a warning that "loginwindow is preventing text expansion" (or something like that)?

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/snippets/

You might both want to take a look at the troubleshooting guide for this, which is usually caused by a hotkey conflict:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/troubleshooting/missing-typed-characters/

As a little trick, if you didn't know, you can type "?keywords" or "?hotkeys" or basically the question mark followed by almost anything that might help jog your memory, such as the name of the workflow, the title of a snippet you can't remember the keyword for, etc...

You can also use the question mark trick to bring up any of Alfred's preferences if you need to quickly check a workflow or change a preference somewhere :)

https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/tips-and-tricks/search-alfred-question-mark-trick/

Download a fresh copy from https://www.alfredapp.com/ and install it, I remember there was an update last week that added support for BigSur, maybe you missed it? I trust this fresh copy has this update and Alfred will work.

You can create a workflow that is triggered by a hotkey, on the hotkey item you can define that you want, as input, the current selected text.

Here’s the official guide explaining in detail just what you need to do, I hope it helps!

Alfred Hotkey Triggers

You can enable it in the Advanced preferences:

https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/tips-and-tricks/quick-tip-view-your-recent-query-history/

The most current version of Alfred isn't available in the App Store, only the free classic version.

You can find the blog post about the reasons for this here (old post, but the reasons remain the same)

https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/announcements/gatekeeper-alfred-and-the-future-of-os-x/

Have you taken a look at the guide to Catalina?

https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/releases/alfred-4-0-5-catalina-support/

Make sure you're using Alfred 4 and have updated to the latest (currently 4.0.8) for the best support for Catalina. :)

For me in the beginning it was not always obvious how to use the Alfred workflow elements but it’s easy to try things out and there are also some example Workflows right in the Alfred settings, where one can see how some elements work.

Also the Alfred docs are well written I think. After working with the normal Alfred Workflow elements I started to use alfy which is a node module to build Alfred Workflows with node.js which I can really recommend if you know some things about programming.

For me fixed in pre-release version (Alfred 4.0.7 pre-release Build 1130). I guess due to this: “Back out default file search sorting from 4.0.4 due to potential performance issues under certain circumstances”

https://www.alfredapp.com/changelog/

Restarting Alfred doesn't change anything, so just make sure you're on the latest version (4.0.5 at this point) and take a look at the blog post for details of what's changed in Catalina, in relation to Alfred:

https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/releases/alfred-4-0-5-catalina-support/

If you have no coding experience you can still create some simple yet useful workflows. In this case you can learn about workflow objects clicking on the [+] button in the bottom left of the Workflows tab in the Alfred Preferences. You will see a lot of commented examples there. It's probably your best starting point.

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Check this page.

When Alfred launches for the first time, you should see the bowler hat appear in the menubar (in the top right of your screen) and Alfred's preferences should also launch.

To show Alfred itself, the default hotkey is Alt + Space, but you can change this if you wish in the preferences.

If you don't see the preferences pop up automatically the first time you launch Alfred, click on the bowler hat and choose "Preferences..."

If you're totally new to Alfred, this guide is a good place to start: https://www.alfredapp.com/blog/tips-and-tricks/beginners-guide-to-alfred-searching-your-mac-and-the-web/

Try downloading Alfred from alfredapp.com and not from a third party site. Ensure that you allow Alfred access to your contacts when the prompt pops up as per this page:

https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/contacts/access-to-contacts/

If Alfred's developer signature isn't correct due to corruption, etc, contacts won't work as expected.

You could add one of Alfred's external triggers to your 'Google Image Search' workflow and a keyword in your 'Reveal Desktop Wallpaper' to call this with an image.

Currently, snippets are plain text plus dynamic placeholders like time, date and clipboard contents.

Examples of date formats: > ISO 8601 date format: {date:yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssZZZZZ}

> Day/Month/Year: {date:dd/MM/yy}

> 12-hr clock with time zone: {date:K:mm a, z}

More details here: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/snippets/#dynamic

Which part are you stuck on?

You’ll need node installed to use this. Which will give you npm

If you’re on Mac or Linux then I recommend using Homebrew (https://brew.sh/) to install node. You can do so by running brew install node

Then you should be able to run the command in the README to install this workflow.

The application comes out to around 6.8 MB I believe so the size of the .dmg doesn't seem all that alarming. If that doesn't work though I highly reccomend trying brew cask install alfred. (This is, using the tool brew)

Once I got Zapier connected to Alfred, that instantly became my most used workflow.
https://zapier.com/blog/zapier-for-alfred/

I type "todo {query}" and it sends it directly to my airtable to-do list. You could send it anywhere, though!

Thank you! I'm confused about what I'm reading about OpenVPN. Does that mean I'm adding yet another account and more costs beyond NordVPN or is this a free, open-source wrapper on top of my existing setup.

I'm trying to wrap my head around Tunnelblick now.

Assuming Nord doesn’t provide a node (or other) API you will need to use actionscript so it all depends on what actionscript functions are supported. Open the script editor, choose “open dictionary “ from the file menu and look for NordVPN (you might need to browse for the app). That will provide you with a list of supported actions.