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Comment by wildrhythms | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day I used Alfred on OS X... basically a system-wide command palette. Lots of its features now exist in Spotlight natively- not just file/folder search- it can do math equations, dictionary lookups, email search with date/keyword matching, currency and unit conversions, language translation, it also supports boolean operators.

I have yet to find a similar functionality from any other OS.

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And even better, you can just go into system preferences and turn off what you don't want!

At one point I had a newish version of OS X spotlight pared down to be about as functional as the Windows 7 start menu Search. If I had wanted command-space to be closer in feature parity to a Windows 10 start menu, it's approximately five reasonably intuitive mouse clicks to get to the settings prefpane with those checkboxes. I too have yet to find similarly well made functionality from any other major-ish desktop OS.

Cmd-, opens spotlight preferences while spotlight is open

I still use Alfred daily! Its development is going strong.

I love Alfreds custom workflows. Half the time I’m using it the same way I’d use Spotlight, but I’m also using it to trigger custom workflows constantly. (Which often just call out to CLI utils or run zsh/Apple/Swift scripts, integrations that Alfred makes easy)

I also appreciate its global hot key support. For example, I’ve setup the F14/F15 keys to adjust brightness on an external monitor. (Just by having a workflow call out to `ddctl`)

Alfred was really cool. I replaced what I liked about Spotlight in Xubuntu by using combination of Guake, XFCE Whisker Menu Search Actions, and DE keyboard shortcuts bound to various scripts. Then I added some more stuff that I never knew I wanted from Spotlight.

I couldn't go back now, TBH, without using some kind of Mac OS native scripting components.

For me, Ulauncher was game-changer on Linux.

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