A Look into Alfred for Mac: Part 4 Power User Tips for System Control & Clipboard Magic

In this episode, Gaurav continues his deep dive into the Alfred app for Mac, focusing on the Features pane within the settings. He provides a detailed walkthrough on customizing Alfred to boost productivity and usability, with special attention to voiceover users.

Gaurav explores various powerful features of Alfred, including Universal Actions, hotkey configuration, web search customization, and clipboard history management. Through practical demonstrations, he shows how to create shortened URLs, compress files, and streamline workflows—all without leaving Alfred.

Highlights include:

• Features Pane Overview: Customize default search results, specify file and folder searches, and set fallbacks for unmatched queries.

• Universal Actions: Learn how to configure hotkeys and perform contextual actions on selected text, URLs, and files, like searching, snippet saving, dictionary lookups, and QR code generation.

• Web Search Shortcuts: Set personalized shortcuts for quick access to Google Images, Amazon, YouTube, and more.

• Clipboard History: Enable and manage clipboard content for easy retrieval and searching.

• Additional Tools: Brief introductions to snippets, calculator, dictionary, contacts viewer, music mini player, and OnePassword integration.

• System Commands: Assign commands for system tasks such as restart, shutdown, and emptying trash.

Step-by-step Universal Actions setup:

1. Open Alfred’s Features tab and set a hotkey for Universal Actions (e.g., Option + Command + A).
2. Select text, URLs, or files and activate the hotkey.
3. Choose from available actions like search, snippet creation, or file compression.

Through these tips and demonstrations, Gaurav aims to help listeners harness Alfred’s full potential, making Mac navigation smoother and more accessible—especially for voiceover users.

Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.

Gaurav: Hello everyone. So today we shall continue our series on the Alfred 5 application for the Mac. And today we are going to dive into the Alfred settings once again and doing an even deeper dive on an aspect of the settings pane called the features pane. So if you might remember in one of my previous episodes, I had done a general walkthrough of the Alfred settings. And today we're going to get a deeper dive under the hood of Alfred and really see how to make this app really useful for us via the features tab. So I'm going to invoke Alfred now by pressing my Alfred keyboard shortcut, which is command plus space. application Alfred system dialog and I'm going to go into settings command comma finder mac alfred preferences alfred preferences search I'm going to go to the left most part of the screen with vo fn left arrow search preferences blank search I'm going to vo right arrow alfred sidebar I'm going to sidebar and I'm going to use the up and down arrows once I'm in the alfred sidebar to navigate features tab selected. Okay, so the second option in the sidebar is features. So now features are selected. I'm going to jump out of the sidebar via shift up arrow.

VoiceOver: Features tab selected. Features list.

Gaurav: And I'm in the features list now. And now in the features list, the way it is kind of oriented is that in the features list, we have a bunch of sub settings and we have further settings below that. So right now, while we're in the features list, I'm just going to quickly scroll through those with just the simple up and down arrows and give you a brief overview of each one of them.

VoiceOver: Default results, scope, types, fallbacks. For default results, scope, types, fallbacks.

Gaurav: So the very first option the features just is default results, scope, types, and fallbacks. Now this is when we use Alfred to search our Mac. Default results basically says, tells Alfred what all folders to look in. Do we want to include or exclude certain folders? Do we want it to not look for certain file types? What will be the scope of the search? And in case it doesn't find anything on our Mac device which meets the search criteria, then it has something called fallbacks, which could be like doing a Google search or a Wikipedia search or whatever you want. So that's what default search and fallbacks are. We'll continue down the list of the features. Down arrow.

VoiceOver: File search, search, navigation, buffer.

Gaurav: file search search navigation and buffer that's the second aspect on the features list this again just further helps us to define what files and folders to search in when searching on alfred again down arrow universal actions files text urls universal actions, files, text, and URL. So universal actions is one of the most powerful aspects of Alfred. It essentially allows us to use a shortcut key to open up a kind of like a contextual menu, which allows us to then take actions on any text we might have highlighted, any URL we might have highlighted, or any file or folder that we're highlighting with our voiceover cursor while going through the finder. We'll do a demonstration on that sometime later, but right now let's just continue down the list here. So down arrow.

VoiceOver: Web search, custom, URLs, history.

Gaurav: Web search custom URLs and history. So this is allows us to have customized web search using Alfred. So, for example, when I open Alfred and I type the letters G I and then space followed by a search term, it will automatically search Google images for that search term. Or if I type AZ followed by a search term, it'll search Amazon. Or I've set the letter, just single letter Y, Y and then space and then it'll search YouTube. So web search is a very powerful tool within Alfred where you can set custom searches for almost any search bar that you find anywhere on the internet. This features pane here also allows us to customize how we allow Alfred to search our bookmarks, which web browsers we would like to allow Alfred to search our bookmarks within, what should be the keyboard shortcut for that, and a few other ordinate things resides here within this list. Let's go down again, down arrow.

VoiceOver: Web bookmarks, Safari, Chrome.

Gaurav: web bookmarks again just uh further deep diving into how you can search bookmarks with alfred let's go down again clipboard history history merging clipboard history again a very very powerful aspect within the alfred app is something called the clipboard history so within this settings pane you can set whether or not you want to enable this feature or not I have enabled it. I find it to be a very useful and powerful aspect of Alfred. Essentially, what I've done is I've set up the clipboard history to save anything that I attach to my clipboard when I press Command-C. That gets saved in a history and I can go and view three months worth of clipboard history. I can search it. I can quickly clear the history if I want to, but it's a very handy tool to quickly go and search what we've added to the clipboard in the past. And this particular setting pane allows us to customize that. Let's go down again, down arrow.

VoiceOver: Snippets, clippings.

Gaurav: I won't get too much into this at this point in time. It's something you can explore yourself. calculator standard calculator something pretty self-explanatory dictionary spelling definitions contacts viewer emailing again pretty self-explanatory music mini player music mini player um alfred has allows you to set up a music mini player that syncs with itunes within alfred i don't use this much so i won't get into it one password one click bookmarks. OnePassword, again, Alfred has a fantastic integration with the OnePassword password manager. So that's something you can explore yourself as well. System commands quitting. So these are, this settings pane allows you to set up various aspects of how you can use Alfred to interact with your system. For example, you can set keywords that allows you to restart your computer. shut down, log in, log out, empty trash, a whole bunch of things. Again, you can explore this yourself, but it's pretty self-explanatory. I'm going to now go back up the features list.

VoiceOver: Want music, comp, dictionary, calculator, snippets, clipboard history, web bookmarks, web search, universal actions, files, text, URLs.

Gaurav: Universal actions. This is the one I want. So I'm going to now VO shift up arrow to come out of the features list.

VoiceOver: Universal actions. Help. Universal actions. Universal app help perform actions on selected items in Mac OS general actions show actions right arrow check FN unchecked control unchecked tap unchecked to action selected item use these options to tweak how else you can show the action selection hot.

Gaurav: So I came out of the features list on the left side of the screen, and I've just used VO right arrow to go through the list of settings available to me here. So I'm just going to kind of talk you through them. Here you can hear, sorry, right here, you might have heard that it says selection hard. Use selection hard. H-O-D, I guess it stands, I'm not sure exactly what this stands for, but let's just go again, V or right arrow.

VoiceOver: Hot is option command A. Option command A, press a key combination to set a new hot.

Gaurav: So this is the hotkey which I set as option command A. This is a very, very powerful part of Alfred. I'm just going to demonstrate this for you shortly. But just remember this option command A, this is the hotkey under universal actions within Alfred's settings.

VoiceOver: Use this hot to show the actions panel for the currently selected item in Mac OS.

Gaurav: So you just heard, use this heart to show the list of actions available for the currently selected item on macOS. So as I said, it acts as a contextual menu on any piece of text or any URL or any file or folder you may have selected. So that's what this does. I'm going to now close out Alfred's settings and show you how this universal actions works. I'm going to open a clean document on TextEdit. And I'm going to type in a URL. Okay, I've just typed in a URL, google.com slash 123456. I'm going to now select this text, command A. Command C. And what I'm going to do is now I'm going to, sorry, just command A. I didn't need to do command C. I'm just going to do command A. So I've selected all of this content. And I'm going to now hit my Universal Actions hotkey command option A. Application.

VoiceOver: Alfred. System dialog. www.google.com. Slash 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Blank. Edit text. www.google.com. Slash 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Gaurav: So you heard it said Alfred system dialog. What it's done is that when I selected this text and hit command option A, which was my hot key, which we'd set in the Alfred settings under universal actions. So now it's opened up a kind of like a dialog box where I can search through all the actions that Alfred can take on this selected piece of text.

VoiceOver: Paste as plain text. Save as snippet. Open in dictionary. Show as large type. Search with finder. Use in Alfred. Email to. Email. String multi-tool. Create QR code. Preview. Create QR code. Clipboard. Ask chat GPT. Word and character count. Amazon India. Apple research. The Pirate Bay quick search. The Pirate Bay Google image search. Google draw. X search. Open X user. Wikipedia. IMDb. YouTube. Facebook. Yubnub. Google web. L. Search for book summary. Create new note. Shorten URL.

Gaurav: so you could hear all the options it was saying it it's allowing me to search for this piece of text on so many different websites allowing me to create a new note with this text and now you can see that it has said shortened url shortened url i'm going to hit enter text edit untitled rtf window. And what it's done is that it's now taken the URL that I had fed to Alfred, and it has now used a free URL shortening service and has given me a new URL. So let's see. It's attached it to my clipboard. I'm just going to hit paste, command V. Here we go. It's given me the... So there you go. It's used the tiny URL service and it has converted my previously longer URL into a smaller URL using tiny URL. Of course, we used a kind of short URL, google.com slash 12345. But if you had a very, very long URL, three, four, five lines long, this was a very quick way to convert it into a short URL format, which you can then share to anybody. I'll show you one more thing which you can do with the universal actions. I'm going to jump into my downloads folder.

VoiceOver: Downloads window, April 2025 PDF PDF document. So this is a document for one of my electricity bills from the month of April.

Gaurav: It's in the form of a PDF. I've just highlighted this in the Finder using the voiceover keyboard focus. I'm now going to hit my Alfred. Universal Actions hotkey, which if you remember was Command Option A. So here we go. Now, just like before, it's going to give me a list of, it's going to open up like a contextual menu, giving me a list of different actions I can take on this file using Alfred.

Gaurav/VoiceOver: Open, open with, open, open with, reveal in finder, reveal in finder, get info, copy to, move to, delete, copy, move, browse folder in Alfred, open terminal here, copy path to clipboard, copy file to clipboard, add file to buffer, paste as plain tag, show as large, search with, use in Alfred, email to, email, Compress PDF document. So if you can see, I can just hit enter now.

Gaurav: finder download and april 2025 compressed pdf pdf document and right right right into the downloads folder where the original source file was kept alfred is now using an application in the in the background has compressed the pdf and has output that compressed pdf back into the same folder as the original source file so i didn't have to go and mess around in any ui or any application alfred has done all the heavy lifting for me and has compressed the file april 2025 pdf pdf document 182 kilobytes 182 kilobytes april 2025 compressed pdf pdf document. So there you can see the original file was 182 kilobytes. The compressed file is 25 kilobytes. So many more things you can do with the help of this shortcut key, this universal action shortcut key. Once you've installed different workflows into Alfred, this universal shortcut key can then be used as a secondary contextual menu into which you can have so many powerful actions which you can take on files, on folders, on pieces of text, on URLs, etc. So many things you can do. You can convert image documents, you can compress files, you can OCR files, you can move files around on your Mac, You can turn something into a shorter URL. You can turn a URL into a QR code. You can so many things. The options are endless. But I hope that through this brief walkthrough where I've given you a deeper view into some of the Alfred settings pane and into how you can set up your universal actions command that you now got a better idea of just how powerful Alfred can be. So thank you so much for listening to this audio demonstration. My name is Gaurav Jhunjhunwala, if you want any details related to how to get in touch with me, then you can just email Email me on gauravjj at gmail.com. That's G for golf, A for alpha, U for umbrella, R for Roger, A for alpha, V for Victor, J for Juliet, J for Juliet once again, and then at gmail.com. So I look forward to seeing how you guys use Alfred and how you take advantage of all the exciting and powerful features, especially for voiceover users like us, where we can now just use the keyboard to quickly search for things in a textual manner rather than having to mess around with different UI elements. Hope this was helpful and yeah, have a great day.