Switched over to Alfred from Spotlight
Last week I switched over to Alfred. I’ve used the native Spotlight on my Mac for years and I thought that it was good enough to get the job done. Basically, I didn’t feel the need to switch over before but then decided to experiment with some new project workflows. I originally heard about Alfred from a video that Hadley Wickham did years ago where he recommended it.
My conclusion is that I should’ve switched over sooner. The workflows feature alone makes it worth it — having the ability to quickly search browser bookmarks, open tabs, and notes is amazing. There are even posts from a bunch of other R programmers on Alfred that I found recently (a, b, and c).
It makes it easier to manage work and open exactly what I need on the fly. Here are features, enhancements, and resources I’ve used so far:
- Snippet for intro on emails
- Clipboard history to revisit copied content
- Easy web search on Github, LinkedIn, Google, Wiki, Giphy, or StackOverflow
- Quick terminal commands
- Calculator
- Alfred themes
- Spelling/dictionary
My third party workflows so far:
- Search browser tabs
- Search notes app
- Search font awesome icon (great for Shiny UI dev)
- Search Movies and TV Shows
- Search timezones
- Search RStudio Projects
- Search tldr
- Search emojis
- Search Stackoverflow (saving for later for if it gets updated to Python3):
Here’s some extras I found along the way:
- Youtube video on cool features/settings
- List of awesome Alfred workflows
