Hidden Productivity Secrets With Alfred

Good developers are always looking for ways to be faster and to automate their workflows. Today, we present a series of workflows in Alfred that will boost your productivity and rock your world.

WHAT IS ALFRED?

For those who don’t know, Alfred is an award-winning Mac OS X app that saves time when you search for files online or on your machine. The new version 2 brings a series of improvements and, with the Powerpack, enables you to create your own workflows.

Below you’ll find a curated list of workflows that will change the way you work.

Open With Sublime Text

One of my favorite features in Alfred is its powerful file and folder search capability. What if we take advantage of this to open files and folders in our favorite code editor — say, Sublime Text 3?

Open With Sublime Text (v3), developed by @franzheidl

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Triggers: subl, subl*

Looking for another code editor? See the “Extras” wiki.

Can I Use… Workflow

In this era of HTML5, you need to check for browser support before implementing certain CSS properties and JavaScript APIs. You could do it by opening a browser tab, navigating to Can I Use…, searching for a keyword and then checking for browser support. Or you could use this Alfred workflow.

Can I Use… Workflow, developed by @willfarrell

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Trigger: caniuse

alfred-caniuse-opt

Dash Workflow

No one knows everything about a given programming language or framework. We occasionally need to check how to use a particular method. Recently, I found an amazing app, Dash, that looks up documentation for different APIs locally, no Internet connection needed. With this workflow, you can search Dash by filtering the keyword for each language. Note that Dash is a free external application, so make sure to download it before using this workflow.

Dash Workflow, developed by @willfarrell

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Triggers: dash, html, css, js, jquery, jqueryui, angularjs, bootstrap, svg, nodejs, php, redis, mysql, man, cpp, sass, compass, backbone, underscore, wordpress, drupal, django, python, python2, elisp, android, yui, ruby, rails, gem

alfred-dash-bs-opt

alfred-dash-js-opt

Terminal Finder

Some operations we prefer to do in the terminal, others in Finder. This workflow switches between them smoothly. Open the current Finder window in Terminal or iTerm, and vice versa.

TerminalFinder, developed by @LeEnno

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Triggers: ft, tf, fi, if

alfred-fi-opt

alfred-tf-opt.png

Package Managers Workflow

Reusing code is an important part of software development, and these days we have a lot of solutions to distribute our code and to search for third-party packages. Need a Node.js module? Need a Grunt task? With this workflow, you can look up plugins and components for your favorite package managers in one place, quickly.

Package Managers Workflow, developed by @willfarrell

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Triggers: bower, grunt, npm, composer, pear, gems, pypi, alcatraz, cocoa, brew, rpm, maven, docker

alfred-pkg-bower-opt

alfred-pkg-grunt-opt

alfred-pkg-npm-opt

Colors

Stop opening Photoshop every time you want to convert a color format. Convert HEX, RGB and HSL colors easily with this workflow.

Colors, developed by @TylerEich

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Triggers: