June 03, 2025

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

17 minutes

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:

Open Alfred’s Features tab and set a hotkey for Universal Actions (e.g., Option + Command + A).
Select text, URLs, or files and activate the hotkey.
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…

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