Alfred Workflows

April 3, 2013

If you own a Mac and haven’t discovered Alfred 2 yet, well I’m sorry.  Combined with its PowerPack, it’s a formidable tool for doing things quickly on the Mac.  I’ve used QuickSilver and LaunchBar.  I held out for a long time as a staunch LaunchBar user, but recently made the switch to Alfred 2 and I’ve got it doing anything everything I need (and boy do I need a lot… I’m lazy and I’ll love keyboard shortcuts).  The only shortcoming with Alfred is its clipboard history, which is limited to text (no images… bummer).  LaunchBar does the clipboard history just right, so I map Alt+Cmd+K to LaunchBar’s clipboard history and I’m good to go.  Sure, LaunchBar is an expensive tool just for clipboard history, but I already owned it and why use Alfred’s crappy clipboard history when I have access to LaunchBar? 🙂

Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of my (now ~24) Alfred 2 workflows for anyone interested:

icon Arrows
Easily type arrow characters (↑, ↓, ←, →) using HTML entity names: uarr, darr, larr, and rarr.
IRC Cloud IRC Cloud
Open IRC Cloud in Chrome with irc.  If you’ve already got IRC Cloud in a tab, it doesn’t open it in a second tab.
icon OpenMRS
A workflow for OpenMRS developers with a few handy shortcuts.

  • op — launches the OpenMRS wiki
  • ot [ticket] — launches OpenMRS JIRA. Naming a ticket goes straight to that ticket; giving just a number will open the corresponding TRUNK ticket; leaving off the ticket just takes you to JIRA.
  • dev — opens the OpenMRS Developers Forum page
  • raf — types Rafał’s name properly into your editor (and into your clipboard in case you need it again)
  • paul – pastes “Paul is a dork” into your editor
icon Volume Controls
Provides some shortcuts for controlling your volume. You thought you were lazy? I know there are dedicated keys for this, but they’re way over there. Alfred shortcuts can be habituated (once learned, you just think and it happens) and don’t require your hands to leave the “home row” of the keyboard.

  • vl — volume low (about one “dot” of volume on the Mac)
  • vh — volume high (crank it up!)
  • mute ‐ guess what this does. 🙂