Alfred is the Spotlight search replacement I can’t live without

Spotlight search is a hallmark of macOS. It’s a powerful tool for accessing apps, files, or searching the internet without your hands needing to leave the comfort of the home row. It’s been replicated across Linux and Windows, and is a hugely popular feature. But it hasn’t improved vastly over the last few decades, and is slowly being overtaken by more extensible, flexible options. That’s where Alfred comes in.

What is Alfred?

Alfred is a complete Spotlight Search replacement

Alfred is a complete third-party replacement for Spotlight Search. It offers a far more extensible and powerful platform with plenty of configuration, while retaining the same speed, ease of access, and sleek design that Spotlight is known for. It’s even a little faster. It’s available for free, though there is a premium version (the “Powerpack”) which enables more features. The Powerpack is where the real extensibility of Alfred is discovered, but Alfred is great without it. It’s regularly faster than Spotlight and far more customizable, allowing you to tweak the appearance, ordering, and priority of results, set fallbacks and search directories, among plenty of other options to make your Spotlight search your own.

Since the team behind Alfred is based in the UK, the Powerpack is available for £34 (or about $43 USD at the time of writing). We should mention that there are other great Alfred alternatives available, notably Raycast. My preference remains with Alfred, mainly due to the subscription-less pricing model for the more serious features, but your mileage may vary.

How to install Alfred

Alfred is available as a .DMG from the project’s website or the Mac App Store.

Once installed, Alfred is accessible via ALT + Space (or Option+ Space). While you can disable spotlight search entirely, I prefer to change my shortcuts around by setting Alfred to CMD + Space and Spotlight to Option + Space.

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Alfred has some truly powerful features

Alfred is packed full of powerful features and it’s generally faster than Spotlight. A full list of its functionality is available online, but we’ll take a look at some of our favorites.

Custom web searches

If you’re a developer, this one is amazing. Alfred supports custom web searches using OpenSearch and SearchAction. This means you can set a custom hotkey (along with custom titles and icons) to easily select a custom search provider in your Alfred search. One custom search I love here is Stack Overflow. By entering ‘so’ followed by my search term, I have quick and easy access to searching Stack Overflow from Spotlight search.

This isn’t just limited to recognized search providers, however. Any web search where the search term is encoded into URL parameters is compatible with Alfred, just replace the relevant query parameter with `{query}` in the URL. Your imagination is the limit here, as plenty of websites use query parameters for search. This is great for setting up custom searches for documentation websites, for example, giving easy access to reference material for a library, function, or component you’re using.

You can set up a custom web search by going to Features > Web Search in the Alfred Preferences menu, and selecting Add a custom search.

Custom Workflows

Workflows are really what makes Alfred incredibly powerful. You can create them yourself, or download them from the Alfred Gallery. These workflows are advanced plugins for your search bar which can enable everything from ChatGPT support in your Spotlight search, to the ability to browse Reddit, convert units, or install packages through Brew.

Alfred Workflows have customizable triggers, but most are activated by entering a keyword. Some workflows can be extremely powerful but, to take a simple example, one workflow I like allows you to toggle do-not-disturb mode for a period of time. This is triggered by entering dnd into your Alfred prompt followed by a period of time, for example 1.5h.

Again, this is a simple example. Workflows can trigger scripts and other software (even the terminal), making them very powerful and offering a fantastic platform for building easily accessible shortcuts within macOS. There’s everything here from mini weather access, to controlling Spotify without needing to tab out. It’s worth googling some curated lists of Alfred Workflows, as the first-party gallery doesn’t do much to make finding them easy. Below are some great workflows we really like:

• Kill Processes will make it easy to kill a misbehaving app without opening Activity Manager.
• Temporary email makes it easy to grab a quick temporary email address using a customizable service (default is SharkLasers).
• Caffeinate control gives you a shortcut to keep your Mac awake for a period of time.

There’s great tooling inside Alfred for creating workflows from a simple diagram of inputs, outputs, effects, and triggers, and they can be easily downloaded and shared. Once you get a grip on leveraging existing workflows, you can experiment with creating your own to automate repetitive tasks or to keep your flow while working. Soon you’ll be wondering how you ever used your Mac without Alfred integration. Workflows do require the Alfred Powerpack.

Terminal integration

Terminal integration is another part of what makes Alfred awesome, and in part what adds so much power to workflows. By prefixing your query with >, you can quickly run any command in a terminal. Which terminal this command opens up in is also customizable. This is great for quickly grabbing some data and saving the time and effort of tabbing out of your window to open a Terminal. I had to add some AppleScript I found on GitHub to get this running with iTerm2, but it works perfectly and is great for keeping your hands on the home row and your flow going.

Customization

If, like me, you’re a sucker for a bit of visual customization, then Alfred has you covered here as well. There’s support for the prompt, which includes a range of modern reinterpretations of the default spotlight prompt as well as some more classic looks. There’s also the option to build your own themes, customize where your prompt appears and on which screen, decide how many results should be displayed, and much more. It’s easy to duplicate an existing theme and make some small tweaks within the built-in theme editor.

Alfred can replace other apps

One other big benefit of Alfred is that you can use it to replace other apps. Got an app installed for managing your clipboard? Alfred can do that for you. The same with Text Expander and other snippets apps, even the macOS dictionary. Some of these features already exist in the default Spotlight, but broadly, they’re faster and easier to access within Alfred. Integrating these apps into Spotlight also helps keep your macOS window management in check.

Alfred is a power user’s dream

Spotlight is the type of tool power users love. It’s got a keyboard interface, works quickly, and is always available. Alfred optimizes your experience, adding not only more functionality and customization, but the ability to set up your own custom workflows and integrations directly at your fingertips. There can be a bit of a learning curve, but once you’re up and running with a suite of powerful integrations, there will be no going back from Alfred.

The Powerpack does offer significant value, and while the free version is an improvement on Spotlight, you do need Powerpack to access a lot of the functionality we’ve mentioned above. We’d suggest you try out the free version, check out some integrations, and generally give it a test drive before making a decision about the Powerpack. Thankfully, Alfred is a single-time purchase (no subscriptions here), so it’s a fire-and-forget commitment to improving your workflow.