The Hackett File: In praise of Alfred

As a long-time Mac user, I’ve always had several small utilities that I’ve depended on for so long they feel like they are part of macOS itself.

Over the past few years, several of these have been absorbed by one program that feels so incredibly important to how I work that a Mac without it seems … broken.

That app is Alfred.

At first glance, Alfred just looks like a replacement for Spotlight, macOS’ built-in search tool that’s been around since Mac OS X Tiger launched in April 2005.

On the surface of it, Alfred is a replacement for Spotlight. It can search local files and folder with ease. From the list of returned items, you can open a file, or perform any number of tasks on it:

Additionally, Alfred learns commonly-used results. If you always open Photoshop (and not Photos) after typing Pho Alfred will adjust and start putting Photoshop above Photos in its results.…