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by cawlin 2114 days ago
My most used Alfred things beyond launching apps/files:

* Clipboard history (screenshots on clipboard in the history is extra useful)

* Snippets using the date placeholders {datetime:short} for various file naming and email workflows

* Snippet shortcuts for things I always forget like the shortcut for → and ™ or my zoom meeting link that I paste into meeting invites

* Launching simple shell scripts by keyword

* Workflow for opening Jira tickets in my browser quickly

* Search notes workflow for quick access to everything in the Notes app

* Soulver workflow for using the Soulver engine in Alfred for doing quick calculations

I was a Quicksilver user that never quite got into Spotlight. I'm betting these days some of these workflows can be accomplished with Spotlight and other apps but Alfred has worked very nicely for me.

3 comments

My man! I don't have much to add, your post mostly echoes what I do.

>* Clipboard history (screenshots on clipboard in the history is extra useful)

Indeed! As I mentioned elsewhere I've reversed the keyboard mappings for screenshots so that Shift+Cmd+4 copies to clipboard and Shift+Ctrl+Cmd+4 creates a file. Then I manage the images through the clipboard.

>* Snippets using the date placeholders {datetime:short} for various file naming and email workflows

>* Snippet shortcuts for things I always forget like the shortcut for → and ™ or my zoom meeting link that I paste into meeting invites

Yes, snippets are invaluable! I have tons of different ones, everything from various API keys, adding user accounts with SSH pubkey on Linux (while checking that password auth is off), outputting an ASCII guitar fretboard, setting up servers with nginx/php/mysql from scratch etc... Haven't actually looked into placeholders though, looks potentially useful although I can't think of a particular use case off the bat.

And everything synced through Dropbox of course.

>* Launching simple shell scripts by keyword

Yes! For example I often run "slack active" and "slack away".

>* Workflow for opening Jira tickets in my browser quickly

I do this as well! "<board> <ticketnumber>" opens them up directly in the browser that I use for work, i.e. "ticket 123" opens /browse/TICKET-123. Super convenient.

And for amusement I've created a couple of workflows to play different sounds, for dramatic and/or comedic effect.

And another workflow creates a new subdomain for a specific domain in Cloudflare.

Alfred is one of the main things that keep me from switching back to Linux.

Wow, here I was thinking I was somewhat original with my JIRA opening workflow. I have it configured exactly the same way.
Good list, and this reminded me to push an edit to add my favorite symbol shortcut which is option+2 for ™. I use Alfred for things like "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" though. I also didn't know about the Soulver workflow, that might be enough to get me to buy Soulver.
Hopefully you don’t need Soulver open? Numi app workflow requires Numi to be fully open. I don’t know if Numi or Soulver are better otherwise. I have Numi via Setapp
> * Clipboard history (screenshots on clipboard in the history is extra useful)

Are you fine that Alfred can read the clipboard?

> * Workflow for opening Jira tickets in my browser quickly

Yes! Navigating JIRA is much easier with Alfred.

> Are you fine that Alfred can read the clipboard?

Yes, the data is not sent anywhere.

Got it. I just activated this feature in my Mac :)
The data stays local. You can check that yourself.