Speeding up your dev workflow with Alfred

Alfred is one of my favourite Mac apps. It’s become a must-have ever since I first installed it about 5 years ago. When I set up a new Mac from scratch, it’s the first thing I install.

In its most basic terms, it’s an extended version of Spotlight, the macOS feature that allows you to press Cmd + Space to search for anything on your Mac. Alfred extends this with built in web search and more customisable file search, as well as a whole host of productivity tools, from contact management to auto-expanding text snippets and clipboard history tracking.

Even more amazingly though, it allows you to create fully custom workflows. These allow you to connect things like the keywords you enter in the search bar with external apps, invoke scrips, and much more.

In addition to hundreds of workflows in the Alfred Gallery, which allow you to do everything from controlling Spotify to using ChatGPT without going to the browser, you can also create your own workflows. Those can be as simple as opening a specific web page when you enter a certain keyword, or as complex as you want to be with custom scripts and actions you manage in a visual editor.