How I use Alfred.
Say hello to the best app evvvverrrr!!! But seriously, I LOVE Alfred, and I think you will too after learning how to put all of its powerful search and optimization features to use.
If this is the first time you're hearing of Alfred, let me get you up to speed: Alfred is a macOS app which helps you boost work efficiency by providing hotkey features, simplified keyword search, text expansion and so much more. With its robust suite of tools, you can easily search your Mac or the web — all while being more productive with custom actions you can control. Sounds awesome? That's because it is.
If you're interested in learning more or getting started, check it out here: http://alfredapp.com/
And for the links I mention in this video, go to: http://theproductivityshop.co/links/
Transcript
Hey what's up? I'm Luke and today I'm going to show you one of my most favorite programs ever. It's basically one of the building blocks of all of my workflows. It's called Alfred. It's an application launcher. It's awesome. [pew pew pew] [laser sounds]. I'm going to show you how to set it up, I'm going to show you the features that are in the free app, and then I'm going to show you all of the PowerPack features that I use as well. I definitely recommend getting this app, if you do get it tweet AlfredApp and say The Productivity Shop sent you, but either way it's an amazing program. This is going to be a super long video so I'll break it up into parts, so if you do want to watch it in parts or jump to certain parts, parts parts parts, you can do that. But let's get started! And yay, okay here we go. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to alfredapp.com, and download it. I'll open the DMG, drag it into the Applications folder, and once you have that done you can go ahead and open it up. I'll go to the Finder, I'll go to Applications, Alfred and open it up. So you'll see the little hat icon show up at the top right, and what I'm going to do is go ahead and open the preferences, if they didn't open up already. Alright the first thing that we're going to do, is we're going to change the Alfred hotkey to be command space. If you don't want to do this, no problem, but I'll go ahead and show you how to change the default keyboard shortcut from spotlight, to Alfred. Alfred is basically spotlight, but does way more things, and I like the keyboard shortcut command space, so I'll go ahead and show you how to do that. So I'll go to System Preferences, I'll go to Keyboard, Shortcuts, Spotlight and I'll deselect these two options here. Once I can do that I can click inside of the Alfred hotkey field, and do command space, and it'll allow me to change it to command space. All right now that we got that done, let's do a little tour. So I'm going to go ahead and open up Alfred now. First it's an application launcher, so rather than have to have a ton of icons inside of the dock you can quickly type the first two letters of any program and it'll jump to it, and Alfred will learn what you choose so if you do "ph" and then select Photoshop, it's going to put that result first. If you do "ph" and then do photo booth, [??] it's going to do that result first. So I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to type in "ph" and then if I want to select the first item, I just push enter. If I want to select the other items I just press [command] 2 3 or 4. Now I'm going to go to the features section in the preferences, and if you close the preferences, just go to the hat at the top, and click on preferences. And you can see default results, so back in the day whenever hard drives weren't static, or solid-state hard drives, searching the entire hard drive wasn't a good idea, so Alfred limits the scope of what you can search for by default. So here I can search for preferences, contacts and applications. So what I'm going to do is search for Luke, and then my contact will come up. If I search for "keyboard", then a preference will come up. Now let's say you want to search for something outside of the scope of these items, what you do is command space, space one more time, and then now it's going to search the entirety of your hard drive. So if I search for fonts, or whatever, it'll find any file on my hard drive by doing command space, space. Mow if I search for certain things a lot, or certain types of files, for example I like to have folders [in] my default results, because of my way that I organize my files, see other video, *plug*, and then so what I'll do is I'll add folders to include them in the default search scope, as well as AppleScripts. So if I want to change to dark mode, now AppleScripts will go ahead and show up, so I don't have to do command space, space, change dark, I can just do command space, change dark because of the fact that I selected AppleScripts to show up. All right, if you want to add another file type you can go to advanced, and just drag any PDF, or any type of file, or jsx, or anything like that, there. Cool. Next you can search the internet with Alfred, so if I search for "how to make cake", it's, and it's not going to find "how to make cake" inside of my default scope, it's going to assume that I want to search the internet. So all I have to do is push enter, and then it'll search Google or whatever search engine that you prefer. You can change it in the settings. With the query that you entered, whenever you enter a query, it's going to use your default browser which is defined inside of the general tab, of System Preferences. You can go to System Preferences, General and change default web browser, to choose which browser you would like Alfred to use. I'm not using a script so I'm proud of myself for not messing up. Okay, so... next we are going to use a prefix to search a certain website for term. Now what do I mean by that? So let's say I want to search for Ikea, and usually what I would do is go to Chrome, I'd go to maps.google.com, and then I would type in "Ikea." But if you go to Alfred preferences, so I'll do command space to activate Alfred, and then I'll do command comma to activate preferences. and the keyboard shortcut is a reminder right here, So I'm going to go ahead and go to web search. inside of the Feature settings of the preferences, you can see that Alfred has some pre-loaded web searches that will automatically search a certain website with your query. So you can see here I'm going to do "maps" as an example. You can search Google Maps for query, and the keyword is maps, so rather than type "Where is Ikea" and it'll just google that query, I'm going to type "maps" and then do space, and then type "Ikea" and it's going to insert Ikea directly into the search field for Google Maps. It's pretty powerful, so there's all these other different ones so I can do youtube the productivity shop oh I can't spell surprise anyway not showing up because I didn't spell it right I'll blame it on that but one other cool thing so what you can do when you're typing a keyword is you do command space and if you see it's the first result you don't have to keep typing the word you can push enter and it'll complete the word let's say it goes twitter or longer then you can do your query for example if I do amazon and push enter it'll finish the word amazon and then I can do whatever now I use the google maps ones a lot so what you can do here is customize the keyword so you just double click you push m so now I can do command space m Ikea boom and it makes it even faster okay now let's say you wanted to go ahead and set up your own custom search for a website that you use I use it for my works wiki um because I search that a lot and then I also use one for soundcloud this is the default settings here so it's not there random tidbit but let's go ahead and set up a default search so I'm going to go ahead and do a search in the website that I want to create a web search for so I'm going to do command space chrome and then command l and go to soundcloud.com okay and then I'm going to go ahead and do a search for daft punk it's important that when you do this test search you use two words so you can see how the search in the particular website handles the spaces okay so I can see here is the search url I'm going to go to Alfred preferences go to the features web search area go to add custom search at the bottom right and then I'm going to read this little phrase here perform a search blah blah blah I hate whenever people read things that you could read yourself but the url is basically you want to look for anything your query here I know that it makes sense let me rephrase so you want you want to look for the search query here and instead of daft punk you're going to put curly bracket query curly bracket so I'm going to copy the entirety of my test search from chrome put it in here and then instead of daft punk I'm going to do query okay then the next step is to insert how the website treats spaces so here you can see the percent sign in 20 so I'm going to put that percent sign in 20. normally I think it's plus signs but whatever you put there okay then I'm going to call it soundcloud okay and then the keyword just like maps and I change it to m for the google map search I'm just going to do sc that's what I remember for soundcloud whatever first comes to mind then for ocd purposes I'm going to go ahead and google soundcloud and then I'm going to go to images or this will work I'm going to find an image and then I'm going to drag the image into the little icon area that's kind of a bad one but you get the point so that way every time that I do the search a little image will pop up and I'll show you how it works but before you push save go ahead and push test and it'll go ahead and search your website for Alfred app so it's working let's go ahead and save it and then we'll use our new custom web search with Alfred command space sc boom daft punk so you can see the icon you can see soundcloud I'll push enter and then boom it's searching soundcloud for your result pretty cool huh okay next I'm going to show you how to change the appearance of the Alfred window you can go to appearance and then they have some options here I think you can also import a theme but basically you can click on the elements and then change them let's see you go to options there are some things here I like to change it to the maximum number of results yeah so just a quick note on how to change the theme and I'll post the theme that I use I'll show you that one in a bit okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make an example and I'm going to call a folder on my desktop main folder now if I wanted to search for that using Alfred I can just type main folder and then push enter and it will go ahead and navigate to main folder folder and it'll navigate and open the folder that I just typed now let's say that I want to navigate to a folder and I do it really often but typing the entire name just takes a long time or I want to rename the folder but I can't because it's a shared working environment there's a way to add a shortcut into the comments in the info panel and you can search for the shortcut instead of typing the folder name so I'll show you how to do that now so let's say this is a work folder here and I'm going to go ahead and create a shortcut for this messenger design folder but I don't want to change the name because everyone else is using it I'm going to do command I and then in the comments sections I'm going to do mess main messenger main and then I'm going to go ahead and close the info window I'll go ahead and close the finder window here and then I'll search for mess main and then you can see the first result is what I just left the hands on so I'll go ahead and push enter and then it'll show up here pretty cool so the last thing that's pretty cool with the free version of the app is the ability to control the computer so if I want to shut down I can go to command space and type in shutdown it'll automatically shut down I can type in lo for lock I can sleep the displays I do that a lot sleep that is the displays or the computer and to see all of the commands you can go to command space command comma and then I'm going to go to system and you can see all of the possible commands here one that I use a lot a lot is quits and I usually change this to q I use force quit a lot so like let's say you're looking at a something and your boss walks by you need to close a program really quick this works well quit all works amazingly as well and won't do that because I'm recording the screen lock is one that I use too okay so let's go ahead and do I like to do hide a lot so if I wanted to quit google chrome really quickly I can do command space fq and then it'll list all of the open applications and I can just push enters like ftch and it'll narrow the results to google chrome and it'll force quit it if I wanted to open it back up and just regularly quit it I would do q chrome enter and the reason why it's cute is because I changed it here so that's pretty much what you get with the free version of the app um there's like a calculator and other things and you can just search through everything here on the left side but what I'm gonna do now is going to go ahead and activate my PowerPack um and we're going to get to the really really even more awesome features of Alfred all right so to buy a power pack you can go to their website I'm going to activate my PowerPack can't see my license all right so the PowerPack is activated and one other cool thing just that I'll point out now they have usage tracking and you can see that I use it on average 100.2 times per day now that I have the PowerPack the first thing that I'm going to do is remove those fallback results so I'll go to features default results set up fallback results at the bottom and take off these babies you can add more if you want um but I hate it one time my boss previous boss said luke I never have to say tell me how you really feel so okay I'm going to change some things here I'm just going to go through the settings and then as I go through the settings show you some cool stuff okay so here I'm going to go to 40 navigation fine buffer fine advanced I like to make sure that this is checked run AppleScripts instead of opening so if I want to do change dark and I push enter it'll go ahead and run the script I'll back up a little bit to see what that does it's a applescript command to change the dark mode and I'll post it on the description box as well below this video so I'll do change dark and I'll do enter and it'll go ahead and run the applescript that I want if I want to open the apple script rather than run it I just go ahead and type the query and I'll do command o on the selected item and it'll open it up in the default program actions file actions big big big this is a huge thing so for the selection hotkey go ahead and make it f11 it's just my personal preference okay this is a really big component for using my dewey decimal system the tartar decimal system or whatever the the way I organize my files and I'll show you why and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the finder I'll make an example so example folder okay so let's say I have my file catalog I want to put this main work folder inside of my file catalog because I'm working on a particular project so normally I would have to click the folder and click click click click click and paste it okay that's why people's desktops and downloads folder is so messy because that takes forever so f it people just whatever but with file actions what I can do is I can select the folder activate file actions by pushing f11 or whatever keyboard shortcut you chose I'm gonna go ahead and choose an action so I'm gonna go ahead and move to but without using the mouse or the wacom tablet I'm going to type move to it's the first result I'll push enter and then I'm going to type the name of the folder that I want to put it into so it's 100 lc project 1. so I'll just push enter and then what it's going to do is going to automatically move that folder one two three four five six levels deep so whenever I download stuff I'm constantly doing f11 move two let's say when I put in my downloads folder boom let's say I go to my downloads folder and I want to put it back into my project folder so I'll do move to project and that's my file catalog because it has the dot space enter boom super super powerful you can also do plenty of other things you can email it so let's say I have a screenshot and then I want to email this f11 email boom it'll go ahead and open my default mail program and put the screenshot as an attachment awesome one cool thing for programmers like let's say if I wanted to open this path at the terminal f11 terminal boom and it'll open that path right there in the terminal so you can do your actions all right so file actions awesome pretty cool let's keep going okay next go to features clipboard history this is really really cool basically the clipboard history will keep track of everything that you copy and put on your clipboard so every time you do command c you can keep it so I'm gonna go ahead and do all three okay I'm gonna change the viewer hotkey to option command h just because I think history you can keep it to whatever you want and then keep all this the same for merging I'm going to do fastapin selected text and then I'm going to place merge text back into clipboard I'll show you what that is in a second and then advanced I think that's fine all right so what is clipboard history I'm going to go ahead and open up ia writer which is just a text program so I'm going to do an example let's pretend I get an email I'm just going to type it as text to pretend but let's pretend that I get an email with some ftp information so normally what I would do is I would select this do command c go to my ftp program and do command v then I'd go back select this command c go back click the field command v I think you get the point but what I can do is instead of doing that what I'll do is I'll do command c command c command c and copy each item separately then since I have my clipboard history activated everything that I copied is now saved so I'll go ahead and do the keyboard shortcut to activate clipboard history and then what I can do is I can see the last three things that I copied and some nine gag stuff okay so if you're on the slack channel best of nine gag is a great channel okay so I can just do paste and it'll paste it activate clipboard history go to the next one activate clipboard history and go to the next one what it can also do like let's say I am chatting with someone and I wanted to I sent a 9gag link to them and I want to send it to someone else but I don't want to go back to the original source where I sent the link to get the url but I know that it was the last one I sent I can activate clipboard history and then I can get all the results that were on my clipboard with this particular query it's really cool now there might be some security issues to this but I have a password on my account and then if I want to clear it all I have to do is command space clear and it'll clear the clipboard history so if you copy passwords normally if you use a program like one password and you copy it it'll only stay on your clipboard for one minute and then the program will automatically take off your password so with one password copying it does not keep in your clipboard history unless you paste it and copy it over anyway another cool thing whenever I went to the clipboard merging this is pretty cool so I'm going to go ahead and just do an example I'm going to write three things now how to use clipboard merging is you go ahead and copy the first item and you do command c now what I'm going to do is copy the second item and do command cc and you'll hear a little noise now when I paste it's going to put the first thing I copied and the second thing that I copied together so if I wanted to do more items I just have to keep doing command cc command cc so command c one time is to start one time so I'll do command c command cc command cc and then I hear the sound each time and it'll put all of the things I copied into one paste result oh that's cool okay one cool feature is contacts you can search for your contacts so if I search luke carter and I can view the contact in Alfred and if I had an email address I can just copy it there okay another cool thing is to create hotkeys so I'll show you how to do that one of my favorite hotkeys and I recommend it as the first one that you do is a keyboard shortcut to go back to the finder I'm always needing myself to just do this and go back to the finder whatever window was there so I'm going to go ahead and open Alfred command space open Alfred preferences command comma I'm going to go to workflows okay I'm going to go ahead and do blank workflow I'm gonna call it go to finder I'm gonna search for finder.app and then what I'm gonna do and this is really cool with Alfred you can drag things from the Alfred search results into other items like into a finder window wherever so I'm going to drag this little icon there boom now we have our icon so description is go to finder and then just ignore the rest all right I'm going to right click anywhere in this stage and I'm going to do triggers triggers uh hotkey okay and I want my hotkey to be ctrl f all right next I'm going to do another one and I'm going to do actions launch apps and files so what I'm going to do is I'm going to search for find out app I'm going to drag the finder app into this little window save in order to connect them so whenever I push control f I'm going to go to the finder so now if I do control f boom it'll take me back to the finder so I have lots of keyboard shortcuts I'll make some more videos later but basically that's how to create a workflow people create workflows and put them on github I'm going to show you a couple in a sec okay so I'm going to go ahead and restore my settings so whenever you have the power whenever you have the PowerPack you whenever you have the PowerPack you can save your settings and then sync them with dropbox and have your settings on multiple computers once you start using Alfred uh like if I use a computer that doesn't have it I I freak out all right so I'm gonna go ahead and go to advanced and then set preferences folder and I'm going to navigate to my dropbox folder where I have my settings kind of been roughing it during this demo so I got my settings restored all right I'm going to run through a bunch of stuff very quickly so I can not make this a million hours long and also not have to type all of the captions okay some cool workflows that I can post one is called uh airdrop so basically what you can do in order to activate airdrop you just type airdrop and it'll open up the airdrop folder something that I use pretty often there's one called open tabs let's say I have a bunch of tabs open and I forget which tab is soundcloud and I don't want to have to open it up again what I can do is activate output type in tabs and then I can type in the name of the tab I'm looking for and it'll search through all of my open tabs in safari and google chrome and when I push enter it'll activate that particular one pretty cool there's also a really cool workflow for giphy and you just do gif and you could do like cool beans and it'll automatically search giphy for cool beings you could also do the custom web search for that okay I'm going to show you something that I call the magic one two punch okay so let's say I have this screenshot and it's inside of this folder okay and I want to open it in a different program like or I want to place it in indesign okay so I want to place it here now if I do file place the file dialog here is in a totally different place and you have to redo that work so here's where my magic one two or three punch comes in handy what I'll do is because I navigated to that picture that I found maybe it's in my downloads folder or somewhere else I'm going to do control f to go back to the finder there's what I'm looking for I'm going to do f11 for file actions I'm going to go up for copy path to clipboard I'm going to do enter I'm going to go back to indesign with command tab shift command g to go to folder command v and then push enter and it will navigate directly to the file now if that's a little complicated for you because I love my keyboard shortcuts another way to do it is just ctrl f and then you can move the folder and drag your result directly into this window I learned that trick recently and then a third way to do the same thing is go to Alfred I'm going to go ahead and back up here go to Alfred I'm going to navigate to my project folder and then to browse within Alfred all I have to do is push right and then now there's like a little file example here I'm gonna go to main folder and then what I can do is drag it here so you can see that it did the same thing so three ways to get some files that you just navigated to into a new program's file dialog this is another really cool one it is a script to navigate to the last thing that was on your desktop or downloads folder and then to open it so okay what do I mean let's say I um take a screenshot it's going to show up on my desktop what I'm going to do is I'm going to push control option d and it's going to highlight that last item that was on my desktop now if I download something let's say I have a bunch of files in here and I'm going to go ahead and download something noice I say that a lot okay so I'm going to download this gif all right now it's in the downloads folder so I want to navigate directly to it so I'm going to do control option l now I make it these shortcuts l is for downloads folder and d is for desktop but control option l and it's going to highlight the exact file that was just in there noise is the right thing to say okay now instead of doing control option I'm going to do shift control which is I call the stack so if I do shift control d it's going to open the last item that was on the desktop so that screenshot okay boom it delayed result but it opened in photoshop now I'm going to open that gift and that's in the downloads folder so I'm going to do shift ctrl l boom noise uh so it's really powerful so you download something you didn't open right away without having to navigate to the downloads folder or desktop folder next another workflow called time zone I love it you can do tz and you can see all of the time zones compared to where you are and if I want to say what time is it will be at you know four o'clock I can see all in four o'clock my time zone it's going to be all of these times around the world I'll just send you the link to that or maybe make a video later but they have set up instructions in the github another workflow that I use and I go a lot is to go to the desktop command 12 that's one that I use often I'll send you that one and then lastly one password can be integrated with Alfred so you can set that up here I'm not going to click on it because it has some personal information but basically all of your 1password entries are now shortcuts in Alfred so if I want to open media temple I can do command space media temple and push enter autumn it's going to ask me for my password and then it'll open up so I'm going to go ahead and do it again assuming that you just entered your password so I'll do command space type in media temple I'll click on the first one and it'll automatically open the website and fill in my password again I'm gonna do another video one password super awesome Alfred is awesome um the people who make it are pretty cool too anyway I love Alfred off it up I love you and yeah so sorry for the long video but this is a really big thing that I use all the time and I hope you like it as much as I do and of course as always if you have any questions please feel free to email me at hello with theproductivityshop.co or join the productivity shop slack channel and thanks so much for watching see ya hey a quick ps I'm going to be officially launching productivity shop and sending out an email blast and I just wanted to thank all of my subscribers that I have so far thank you for all the comments and the nice emails and slack messages and everything I might send out a little surprise or a little postcard for my subscribers that I have now as a thank you so join this productivity slop slack channel and send me your address if you'd like but thanks so much for being my first subscribers and I really appreciate all the support later not bad for two kids that's what trixie tell and that's what tricks me tell said once but not bad for no script that's what I was going to say a pss
Hey what's up? I'm Luke and today I'm going to show you one of my most favorite programs ever. It's basically one of the building blocks of all of my workflows. It's called Alfred. It's an application launcher. It's awesome. [pew pew pew] [laser sounds]. I'm going to show you how to set it up, I'm going to show you the features that are in the free app, and then I'm going to show you all of the PowerPack features that I use as well. I definitely recommend getting this app, if you do get it tweet AlfredApp and say The Productivity Shop sent you, but either way it's an amazing program. This is going to be a super long video so I'll break it up into parts, so if you do want to watch it in parts or jump to certain parts, parts parts parts, you can do that. But let's get started! And yay, okay here we go. So I'm gonna go ahead and go to alfredapp.com, and download it. I'll open the DMG, drag it into the Applications folder, and once you have that done you can go ahead and open it up. I'll go to the Finder, I'll go to Applications, Alfred and open it up. So you'll see the little hat icon show up at the top right, and what I'm going to do is go ahead and open the preferences, if they didn't open up already. Alright the first thing that we're going to do, is we're going to change the Alfred hotkey to be command space. If you don't want to do this, no problem, but I'll go ahead and show you how to change the default keyboard shortcut from spotlight, to Alfred. Alfred is basically spotlight, but does way more things, and I like the keyboard shortcut command space, so I'll go ahead and show you how to do that. So I'll go to System Preferences, I'll go to Keyboard, Shortcuts, Spotlight and I'll deselect these two options here. Once I can do that I can click inside of the Alfred hotkey field, and do command space, and it'll allow me to change it to command space. All right now that we got that done, let's do a little tour. So I'm going to go ahead and open up Alfred now. First it's an application launcher, so rather than have to have a ton of icons inside of the dock you can quickly type the first two letters of any program and it'll jump to it, and Alfred will learn what you choose so if you do "ph" and then select Photoshop, it's going to put that result first. If you do "ph" and then do photo booth, [??] it's going to do that result first. So I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to type in "ph" and then if I want to select the first item, I just push enter. If I want to select the other items I just press [command] 2 3 or 4. Now I'm going to go to the features section in the preferences, and if you close the preferences, just go to the hat at the top, and click on preferences. And you can see default results, so back in the day whenever hard drives weren't static, or solid-state hard drives, searching the entire hard drive wasn't a good idea, so Alfred limits the scope of what you can search for by default. So here I can search for preferences, contacts and applications. So what I'm going to do is search for Luke, and then my contact will come up. If I search for "keyboard", then a preference will come up. Now let's say you want to search for something outside of the scope of these items, what you do is command space, space one more time, and then now it's going to search the entirety of your hard drive. So if I search for fonts, or whatever, it'll find any file on my hard drive by doing command space, space. Mow if I search for certain things a lot, or certain types of files, for example I like to have folders [in] my default results, because of my way that I organize my files, see other video, *plug*, and then so what I'll do is I'll add folders to include them in the default search scope, as well as AppleScripts. So if I want to change to dark mode, now AppleScripts will go ahead and show up, so I don't have to do command space, space, change dark, I can just do command space, change dark because of the fact that I selected AppleScripts to show up. All right, if you want to add another file type you can go to advanced, and just drag any PDF, or any type of file, or jsx, or anything like that, there. Cool. Next you can search the internet with Alfred, so if I search for "how to make cake", it's, and it's not going to find "how to make cake" inside of my default scope, it's going to assume that I want to search the internet. So all I have to do is push enter, and then it'll search Google or whatever search engine that you prefer. You can change it in the settings. With the query that you entered, whenever you enter a query, it's going to use your default browser which is defined inside of the general tab, of System Preferences. You can go to System Preferences, General and change default web browser, to choose which browser you would like Alfred to use. I'm not using a script so I'm proud of myself for not messing up. Okay, so... next we are going to use a prefix to search a certain website for term. Now what do I mean by that? So let's say I want to search for Ikea, and usually what I would do is go to Chrome, I'd go to maps.google.com, and then I would type in "Ikea." But if you go to Alfred preferences, so I'll do command space to activate Alfred, and then I'll do command comma to activate preferences. and the keyboard shortcut is a reminder right here, So I'm going to go ahead and go to web search. inside of the Feature settings of the preferences, you can see that Alfred has some pre-loaded web searches that will automatically search a certain website with your query. So you can see here I'm going to do "maps" as an example. You can search Google Maps for query, and the keyword is maps, so rather than type "Where is Ikea" and it'll just google that query, I'm going to type "maps" and then do space, and then type "Ikea" and it's going to insert Ikea directly into the search field for Google Maps. It's pretty powerful, so there's all these other different ones so I can do youtube the productivity shop oh I can't spell surprise anyway not showing up because I didn't spell it right I'll blame it on that but one other cool thing so what you can do when you're typing a keyword is you do command space and if you see it's the first result you don't have to keep typing the word you can push enter and it'll complete the word let's say it goes twitter or longer then you can do your query for example if I do amazon and push enter it'll finish the word amazon and then I can do whatever now I use the google maps ones a lot so what you can do here is customize the keyword so you just double click you push m so now I can do command space m Ikea boom and it makes it even faster okay now let's say you wanted to go ahead and set up your own custom search for a website that you use I use it for my works wiki um because I search that a lot and then I also use one for soundcloud this is the default settings here so it's not there random tidbit but let's go ahead and set up a default search so I'm going to go ahead and do a search in the website that I want to create a web search for so I'm going to do command space chrome and then command l and go to soundcloud.com okay and then I'm going to go ahead and do a search for daft punk it's important that when you do this test search you use two words so you can see how the search in the particular website handles the spaces okay so I can see here is the search url I'm going to go to Alfred preferences go to the features web search area go to add custom search at the bottom right and then I'm going to read this little phrase here perform a search blah blah blah I hate whenever people read things that you could read yourself but the url is basically you want to look for anything your query here I know that it makes sense let me rephrase so you want you want to look for the search query here and instead of daft punk you're going to put curly bracket query curly bracket so I'm going to copy the entirety of my test search from chrome put it in here and then instead of daft punk I'm going to do query okay then the next step is to insert how the website treats spaces so here you can see the percent sign in 20 so I'm going to put that percent sign in 20. normally I think it's plus signs but whatever you put there okay then I'm going to call it soundcloud okay and then the keyword just like maps and I change it to m for the google map search I'm just going to do sc that's what I remember for soundcloud whatever first comes to mind then for ocd purposes I'm going to go ahead and google soundcloud and then I'm going to go to images or this will work I'm going to find an image and then I'm going to drag the image into the little icon area that's kind of a bad one but you get the point so that way every time that I do the search a little image will pop up and I'll show you how it works but before you push save go ahead and push test and it'll go ahead and search your website for Alfred app so it's working let's go ahead and save it and then we'll use our new custom web search with Alfred command space sc boom daft punk so you can see the icon you can see soundcloud I'll push enter and then boom it's searching soundcloud for your result pretty cool huh okay next I'm going to show you how to change the appearance of the Alfred window you can go to appearance and then they have some options here I think you can also import a theme but basically you can click on the elements and then change them let's see you go to options there are some things here I like to change it to the maximum number of results yeah so just a quick note on how to change the theme and I'll post the theme that I use I'll show you that one in a bit okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make an example and I'm going to call a folder on my desktop main folder now if I wanted to search for that using Alfred I can just type main folder and then push enter and it will go ahead and navigate to main folder folder and it'll navigate and open the folder that I just typed now let's say that I want to navigate to a folder and I do it really often but typing the entire name just takes a long time or I want to rename the folder but I can't because it's a shared working environment there's a way to add a shortcut into the comments in the info panel and you can search for the shortcut instead of typing the folder name so I'll show you how to do that now so let's say this is a work folder here and I'm going to go ahead and create a shortcut for this messenger design folder but I don't want to change the name because everyone else is using it I'm going to do command I and then in the comments sections I'm going to do mess main messenger main and then I'm going to go ahead and close the info window I'll go ahead and close the finder window here and then I'll search for mess main and then you can see the first result is what I just left the hands on so I'll go ahead and push enter and then it'll show up here pretty cool so the last thing that's pretty cool with the free version of the app is the ability to control the computer so if I want to shut down I can go to command space and type in shutdown it'll automatically shut down I can type in lo for lock I can sleep the displays I do that a lot sleep that is the displays or the computer and to see all of the commands you can go to command space command comma and then I'm going to go to system and you can see all of the possible commands here one that I use a lot a lot is quits and I usually change this to q I use force quit a lot so like let's say you're looking at a something and your boss walks by you need to close a program really quick this works well quit all works amazingly as well and won't do that because I'm recording the screen lock is one that I use too okay so let's go ahead and do I like to do hide a lot so if I wanted to quit google chrome really quickly I can do command space fq and then it'll list all of the open applications and I can just push enters like ftch and it'll narrow the results to google chrome and it'll force quit it if I wanted to open it back up and just regularly quit it I would do q chrome enter and the reason why it's cute is because I changed it here so that's pretty much what you get with the free version of the app um there's like a calculator and other things and you can just search through everything here on the left side but what I'm gonna do now is going to go ahead and activate my PowerPack um and we're going to get to the really really even more awesome features of Alfred all right so to buy a power pack you can go to their website I'm going to activate my PowerPack can't see my license all right so the PowerPack is activated and one other cool thing just that I'll point out now they have usage tracking and you can see that I use it on average 100.2 times per day now that I have the PowerPack the first thing that I'm going to do is remove those fallback results so I'll go to features default results set up fallback results at the bottom and take off these babies you can add more if you want um but I hate it one time my boss previous boss said luke I never have to say tell me how you really feel so okay I'm going to change some things here I'm just going to go through the settings and then as I go through the settings show you some cool stuff okay so here I'm going to go to 40 navigation fine buffer fine advanced I like to make sure that this is checked run AppleScripts instead of opening so if I want to do change dark and I push enter it'll go ahead and run the script I'll back up a little bit to see what that does it's a applescript command to change the dark mode and I'll post it on the description box as well below this video so I'll do change dark and I'll do enter and it'll go ahead and run the applescript that I want if I want to open the apple script rather than run it I just go ahead and type the query and I'll do command o on the selected item and it'll open it up in the default program actions file actions big big big this is a huge thing so for the selection hotkey go ahead and make it f11 it's just my personal preference okay this is a really big component for using my dewey decimal system the tartar decimal system or whatever the the way I organize my files and I'll show you why and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the finder I'll make an example so example folder okay so let's say I have my file catalog I want to put this main work folder inside of my file catalog because I'm working on a particular project so normally I would have to click the folder and click click click click click and paste it okay that's why people's desktops and downloads folder is so messy because that takes forever so f it people just whatever but with file actions what I can do is I can select the folder activate file actions by pushing f11 or whatever keyboard shortcut you chose I'm gonna go ahead and choose an action so I'm gonna go ahead and move to but without using the mouse or the wacom tablet I'm going to type move to it's the first result I'll push enter and then I'm going to type the name of the folder that I want to put it into so it's 100 lc project 1. so I'll just push enter and then what it's going to do is going to automatically move that folder one two three four five six levels deep so whenever I download stuff I'm constantly doing f11 move two let's say when I put in my downloads folder boom let's say I go to my downloads folder and I want to put it back into my project folder so I'll do move to project and that's my file catalog because it has the dot space enter boom super super powerful you can also do plenty of other things you can email it so let's say I have a screenshot and then I want to email this f11 email boom it'll go ahead and open my default mail program and put the screenshot as an attachment awesome one cool thing for programmers like let's say if I wanted to open this path at the terminal f11 terminal boom and it'll open that path right there in the terminal so you can do your actions all right so file actions awesome pretty cool let's keep going okay next go to features clipboard history this is really really cool basically the clipboard history will keep track of everything that you copy and put on your clipboard so every time you do command c you can keep it so I'm gonna go ahead and do all three okay I'm gonna change the viewer hotkey to option command h just because I think history you can keep it to whatever you want and then keep all this the same for merging I'm going to do fastapin selected text and then I'm going to place merge text back into clipboard I'll show you what that is in a second and then advanced I think that's fine all right so what is clipboard history I'm going to go ahead and open up ia writer which is just a text program so I'm going to do an example let's pretend I get an email I'm just going to type it as text to pretend but let's pretend that I get an email with some ftp information so normally what I would do is I would select this do command c go to my ftp program and do command v then I'd go back select this command c go back click the field command v I think you get the point but what I can do is instead of doing that what I'll do is I'll do command c command c command c and copy each item separately then since I have my clipboard history activated everything that I copied is now saved so I'll go ahead and do the keyboard shortcut to activate clipboard history and then what I can do is I can see the last three things that I copied and some nine gag stuff okay so if you're on the slack channel best of nine gag is a great channel okay so I can just do paste and it'll paste it activate clipboard history go to the next one activate clipboard history and go to the next one what it can also do like let's say I am chatting with someone and I wanted to I sent a 9gag link to them and I want to send it to someone else but I don't want to go back to the original source where I sent the link to get the url but I know that it was the last one I sent I can activate clipboard history and then I can get all the results that were on my clipboard with this particular query it's really cool now there might be some security issues to this but I have a password on my account and then if I want to clear it all I have to do is command space clear and it'll clear the clipboard history so if you copy passwords normally if you use a program like one password and you copy it it'll only stay on your clipboard for one minute and then the program will automatically take off your password so with one password copying it does not keep in your clipboard history unless you paste it and copy it over anyway another cool thing whenever I went to the clipboard merging this is pretty cool so I'm going to go ahead and just do an example I'm going to write three things now how to use clipboard merging is you go ahead and copy the first item and you do command c now what I'm going to do is copy the second item and do command cc and you'll hear a little noise now when I paste it's going to put the first thing I copied and the second thing that I copied together so if I wanted to do more items I just have to keep doing command cc command cc so command c one time is to start one time so I'll do command c command cc command cc and then I hear the sound each time and it'll put all of the things I copied into one paste result oh that's cool okay one cool feature is contacts you can search for your contacts so if I search luke carter and I can view the contact in Alfred and if I had an email address I can just copy it there okay another cool thing is to create hotkeys so I'll show you how to do that one of my favorite hotkeys and I recommend it as the first one that you do is a keyboard shortcut to go back to the finder I'm always needing myself to just do this and go back to the finder whatever window was there so I'm going to go ahead and open Alfred command space open Alfred preferences command comma I'm going to go to workflows okay I'm going to go ahead and do blank workflow I'm gonna call it go to finder I'm gonna search for finder.app and then what I'm gonna do and this is really cool with Alfred you can drag things from the Alfred search results into other items like into a finder window wherever so I'm going to drag this little icon there boom now we have our icon so description is go to finder and then just ignore the rest all right I'm going to right click anywhere in this stage and I'm going to do triggers triggers uh hotkey okay and I want my hotkey to be ctrl f all right next I'm going to do another one and I'm going to do actions launch apps and files so what I'm going to do is I'm going to search for find out app I'm going to drag the finder app into this little window save in order to connect them so whenever I push control f I'm going to go to the finder so now if I do control f boom it'll take me back to the finder so I have lots of keyboard shortcuts I'll make some more videos later but basically that's how to create a workflow people create workflows and put them on github I'm going to show you a couple in a sec okay so I'm going to go ahead and restore my settings so whenever you have the power whenever you have the PowerPack you whenever you have the PowerPack you can save your settings and then sync them with dropbox and have your settings on multiple computers once you start using Alfred uh like if I use a computer that doesn't have it I I freak out all right so I'm gonna go ahead and go to advanced and then set preferences folder and I'm going to navigate to my dropbox folder where I have my settings kind of been roughing it during this demo so I got my settings restored all right I'm going to run through a bunch of stuff very quickly so I can not make this a million hours long and also not have to type all of the captions okay some cool workflows that I can post one is called uh airdrop so basically what you can do in order to activate airdrop you just type airdrop and it'll open up the airdrop folder something that I use pretty often there's one called open tabs let's say I have a bunch of tabs open and I forget which tab is soundcloud and I don't want to have to open it up again what I can do is activate output type in tabs and then I can type in the name of the tab I'm looking for and it'll search through all of my open tabs in safari and google chrome and when I push enter it'll activate that particular one pretty cool there's also a really cool workflow for giphy and you just do gif and you could do like cool beans and it'll automatically search giphy for cool beings you could also do the custom web search for that okay I'm going to show you something that I call the magic one two punch okay so let's say I have this screenshot and it's inside of this folder okay and I want to open it in a different program like or I want to place it in indesign okay so I want to place it here now if I do file place the file dialog here is in a totally different place and you have to redo that work so here's where my magic one two or three punch comes in handy what I'll do is because I navigated to that picture that I found maybe it's in my downloads folder or somewhere else I'm going to do control f to go back to the finder there's what I'm looking for I'm going to do f11 for file actions I'm going to go up for copy path to clipboard I'm going to do enter I'm going to go back to indesign with command tab shift command g to go to folder command v and then push enter and it will navigate directly to the file now if that's a little complicated for you because I love my keyboard shortcuts another way to do it is just ctrl f and then you can move the folder and drag your result directly into this window I learned that trick recently and then a third way to do the same thing is go to Alfred I'm going to go ahead and back up here go to Alfred I'm going to navigate to my project folder and then to browse within Alfred all I have to do is push right and then now there's like a little file example here I'm gonna go to main folder and then what I can do is drag it here so you can see that it did the same thing so three ways to get some files that you just navigated to into a new program's file dialog this is another really cool one it is a script to navigate to the last thing that was on your desktop or downloads folder and then to open it so okay what do I mean let's say I um take a screenshot it's going to show up on my desktop what I'm going to do is I'm going to push control option d and it's going to highlight that last item that was on my desktop now if I download something let's say I have a bunch of files in here and I'm going to go ahead and download something noice I say that a lot okay so I'm going to download this gif all right now it's in the downloads folder so I want to navigate directly to it so I'm going to do control option l now I make it these shortcuts l is for downloads folder and d is for desktop but control option l and it's going to highlight the exact file that was just in there noise is the right thing to say okay now instead of doing control option I'm going to do shift control which is I call the stack so if I do shift control d it's going to open the last item that was on the desktop so that screenshot okay boom it delayed result but it opened in photoshop now I'm going to open that gift and that's in the downloads folder so I'm going to do shift ctrl l boom noise uh so it's really powerful so you download something you didn't open right away without having to navigate to the downloads folder or desktop folder next another workflow called time zone I love it you can do tz and you can see all of the time zones compared to where you are and if I want to say what time is it will be at you know four o'clock I can see all in four o'clock my time zone it's going to be all of these times around the world I'll just send you the link to that or maybe make a video later but they have set up instructions in the github another workflow that I use and I go a lot is to go to the desktop command 12 that's one that I use often I'll send you that one and then lastly one password can be integrated with Alfred so you can set that up here I'm not going to click on it because it has some personal information but basically all of your 1password entries are now shortcuts in Alfred so if I want to open media temple I can do command space media temple and push enter autumn it's going to ask me for my password and then it'll open up so I'm going to go ahead and do it again assuming that you just entered your password so I'll do command space type in media temple I'll click on the first one and it'll automatically open the website and fill in my password again I'm gonna do another video one password super awesome Alfred is awesome um the people who make it are pretty cool too anyway I love Alfred off it up I love you and yeah so sorry for the long video but this is a really big thing that I use all the time and I hope you like it as much as I do and of course as always if you have any questions please feel free to email me at hello with theproductivityshop.co or join the productivity shop slack channel and thanks so much for watching see ya hey a quick ps I'm going to be officially launching productivity shop and sending out an email blast and I just wanted to thank all of my subscribers that I have so far thank you for all the comments and the nice emails and slack messages and everything I might send out a little surprise or a little postcard for my subscribers that I have now as a thank you so join this productivity slop slack channel and send me your address if you'd like but thanks so much for being my first subscribers and I really appreciate all the support later not bad for two kids that's what trixie tell and that's what tricks me tell said once but not bad for no script that's what I was going to say a pss
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