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Comment by beck5 | Hacker News Reader

I have found Alfred a very polished alternative and a little more robust than quicksilver has been over the past couple of years.

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I've tried to make myself love Alfred, and it's admittedly very polished for what it is, but to me it seems to miss the entire thing that makes Quicksilver just so productive to use: the [object][verb] syntax.

Alfred kind of bizarrely stops half-way there: you type anything to find the object you want to manipulate, and then... pick a verb by hitting the appropriate command key or arrowing through a list. My hands are already in the middle of the keyboard, just let me type the verb name!

I think its fair to say quicksilver is more powerful, you can really do almost anything in it. I however didn't use many of the power features (resizing images or composing e-mails).

Alfred is really just a launcher with a few nice bonus features (clipboard history & spell are my favourite) where as quicksilver is more like a command line power house.

For things like files Alfred does have verbs.

examples:

    open report.pdf - opens in default pdf application

    find report.pdf - opens directory in finder

Take a look around in the preferences, while it doesn't have all the features of Quicksiver, you'll be surprised.

(Edited formatting)

Yeah, I'm not wild about the verb first syntax, personally. It doesn't seem to fit the mental models I've formed over the years.

I have enjoyed the fact that Alfred doesn't crash, but it seems much worse at interpreting abbreviations. For example, with no training QuickSilver took me to TextMate by typing "tm," where Alfred still has trouble with this. I also considered LaunchBar. It looks very nice, but I cannot justify the price for my use given the alternatives.

I agree, it also doesn't seam to 'learn' in the way quicksilver did.

I don't think I've every come across launch bar but I agree on the price.

I didn't notice much difference in default guesses or training in LaunchBar compared to QuickSilver

There's two ways you can do this with Alfred:

1. Turn on fuzzy matching in the preferences under Applications (with or without anchoring, as you prefer)

2. Create a Spotlight Comment if you want to call it something completely different (e.g. label all your browsers with the keyword "browser" to launch them all at once) More on Spotlight comments here: http://help.alfredapp.com/features/applications/

I've been very happy with it, but I'm also happy to switch back. Alfred routinely forgets my pref-panes, and sometimes applications as a whole, and I do miss substring matching and explicit defaults (ie, "a" always does activity monitor for me).

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