Alfred - a powerful graphical command line | NYC PHP Developer

The command line is a powerful thing. Usually, when people talk about the command line, they’re usually referring to a UNIX/Linux terminal or a DOS prompt. This type of command line provides an interface to the operating system. They allow users to use commands to execute commands at will. Nowadays, there’s a newer style of command line – a GUI command line. There’s a great app for OS X that provides one — Alfred.

I had learned of Alfred over a year ago, but originally dismissed it. Yes I know, my bad. I gave it another look a few months ago. I’ve been hooked ever since. It’s made things easier and faster to do. After you install it, your first step is to buy the power pack. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Common Operations

There are a number of common things that you do with your computer, that Alfred makes easier. When you want to step away from your computer, use the Lock command. If you’re done for the day, you might want to use the Quit All and Sleep commands. If you have a thumb drive plugged in, you Eject to safely unmount it. Here’s a list of the common commands.

Eject
Empty Trash
Force Quit
Hide
Lock
Logout
Quit
Quit All
Restart
Screen Saver
Show Trash
Shutdown
Sleep

Adding Custom Queries

The Alfred team has setup several queries that you can start using right away. Bing, Yahoo, Gmail, DuckDuckGo each can be used. You can also create your own search and assign a unique keyword of your choosing. When I started using Alfred, I created one using the keyword ‘search’ that was essentially a duplicate of google. Why would I do that? To make it easy to change the default engine in the future. The future came early, because a couple of weeks ago, I changed the URL for my ‘search’ keyword to use DuckDuckGo. I can rely on my muscle memory and still get the result I want. If I want use a different engine once, I still can.

It has more than just typical search engines. Alfred provides searches for other sites like Wikipedia, Amazon, and IMDB. I’m a web developer that specializes in PHP and WordPress websites, so I’ve created some custom web searches to help with web development related topics. Also, it’s nice looking through search results that aren’t cluttered with w3schools and StackOverflow links.

jq jQuery Documentation
mdn Mozilla Documentation network (HTML, CSS, JS)
wpf WordPress Function Reference
php Search php.net Manual
phpf Lookup a function by name on php.net

Searches are only part the magic that Alfred offers. Workflows are another great feature. You can use workflows to automate tasks using a variety of triggers. I’ve only scratched the surface, but one thing I use them for is to open sites using a keyword. Imagine typing a keyword and you could open multiple application for you. That’s just one common way you might want to use it.