Why Alfred Is the First App You Should Install on Your Mac

Let's face it - Macs are very powerful, but the default Spotlight search is... meh 🤷‍♂.

Spotlight is that little search bar you summon with ⌘ + Space that is meant to help you quickly open apps, find files and search the web.

The problem? It rarely does what you actually want.
How many times have you tried opening the "Downloads" folder and ended up in a Google search or the App Store instead?

Why the hell would this be the first suggestion?

That's where Alfred comes in - a faster, smarter and more flexible alternative to Spotlight.

That's better... 😎🎩

By the way — this isn’t sponsored. Just a genuinely happy user sharing a tool I love.

📚 Table of Contents

• 🎩 What is Alfred?
• ⚛ Core Features (Free & Paid)
• ⏳ Real-World Example: Looking Up Invoices (10 Steps -> 1)
• 🛠️ Install Alfred
• ✨ Create Your First Custom Web Search
• 📝 Final Notes

🎩 What is Alfred?

Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac
(from Alfred's official website)

Alfred launches apps instantly, finds files reliably, learns your habits and even lets you create custom search shortcuts for the websites, flows and tools you use every day.
All of that - for free.

The cool thing is, Alfred adapts to you. The more you use it - the better its suggestions become.

Alfred is free to use, with optional advanced paid features in the Powerpack (a one-time purchase, not a subscription).
But even if you stick with the free version - value is guaranteed.

I couldn't recommend it more.

⚛ Core Features (Free & Paid)

Even in the free version, Alfred offers powerful tools that make your mac feel snappier and smarter:

• 🚀 App Launcher – Type part of an app’s name, hit Enter, and it’s open. Super fast.
  

• 🔍 File Search – Quickly find files and folders on your Mac. You can open a file directly, reveal it in Finder, search by tags and even search by file content.
  

• 🌐 Custom Web Search – Search any website straight from Alfred (more on this in the next section 👀).

• ⚙ System Commands – Sleep, restart, empty trash, lock your screen — all from Alfred.

• ✏ Learns as You Go – Alfred remembers your habits and boosts your most-used results.

  A few extra features are included in the Powerpack (paid 💰):

• 🕥 Clipboard History – Search your copy history and paste anything you've ever copied.

  I'm using another app called Paste, you can read about it in my article about clipboard managers.

• 📋 Snippets – Create custom text shortcuts to save time typing.

  As a free replacement you can use macOS's text replacements.

• 🔄 Workflows – Build advanced automations (but that's material for another article 🗒️).

  👉 Everything in this article works 100% in the free version.

⏳ Real-World Example: Looking Up Invoices (10 Steps -> 1)

Let's take a look at an actual example from my day-to-day that demonstrates how much time I save using Alfred.

At work, I often need to find a customer invoice using just its ID. Some days, I do this dozens of times.
Let's say our invoice ID is 123456789.

The usual process looks like this:

1. Open our internal back office system and wait for it to load (⌨️⏱️)

2. Select "Search by Invoice ID" (🖱)
   

3. Paste the invoice ID  (⌨)
   

4. Press Enter and wait (⌨⏱️)

5. Click the matched account (🖱)
   

6. Navigate to the "Invoices" tab (🖱)
   

7. Use ⌘ + F and search for the specific invoice (⌨)

8. Find the correct invoice in the list

9. Click it (🖱)
   

10. Finally — the invoice page loads 😫

That’s 10 steps, dozens of clicks, and constant switching between keyboard and mouse.

This process takes around 10-20 seconds, depending on how old the invoice is (older invoices require more scrolling to load).

Let's say it takes 15 seconds on average, and I do this 20 times per day.

15 seconds × 20 = 300 seconds = 5 minutes/day.

5 minutes × 250 workdays = 1250 minutes/year = 20+ hours/year.

🔥 With Alfred, I turned all that into one line:

I open Alfred with ⌘ + Space, type:
invoice 123456789

...and it instantly opens the correct invoice page.
Just one step (or two, if you count opening Alfred).

Even better? Alfred learns. Since I use this often, typing i is enough - it autocompletes to invoice, and I just paste the ID and hit Enter.

(As you can see, I use it more than I open my terminal. And I open my terminal a lot).

This entire flow takes less than a second.
That’s dozens of hours saved every year — with just one tiny automation.
And I didn't even need to upgrade to the paid version for it.

How Did I Do It?

I created a custom web search - a free feature - using this URL format:
https://{OUR_BACKOFFICE_URL}/invoices/ui/details?invoiceId={query}

So in our case, the URL was:
https://{OUR_BACKOFFICE_URL}/invoices/ui/details?invoiceId=123456789

This works because our system uses a URL parameter (invoiceId) to load a specific invoice.
I can use the keyword {query} to get a parameter from the Alfred command straight to the URL and open it instantly.

Luckily - most modern websites nowadays use query parameters - including:

• Google
• YouTube
• Amazon
• GitHub
• Google Maps
• Urban Dictionary
• And many internal tools at work

This means we can create these custom web searches for each of these services.
Alfred even has built-in web searches for many of these already.
You can also create your own, specific to your tools and workflows.

Alfred becomes a search-anything launcher — for your browser, tools, docs, and more.

After the next installation section - we will build our very first custom web search together.
If you already have Alfred, you can skip straight to action.

🛠️ Install Alfred

The installation process is very simple.

• Go to Alfred's website and click on the "Download Alfred 5" button.
  

• Go through the simple installation process (you can skip the part in which it asks for a license key and just use the free version).

• That's it! Alfred is ready for you to use.

The default command to launch Alfred is Option (⌥) + Space.
Try hitting ⌥ + Space, type an app's name and hit Enter to launch it! 🚀

You can change the Alfred's launch hotkey to be ⌘ + Space like I did, but this hotkey is already taken by Spotlight (which you don't need anymore).

Let's change that.

Go into your Mac's settings (you can use Alfred for that 😎. hit ⌥ + Space, write settings and hit Enter).

Search for keyboard in the settings' search, and click keyboard shortcuts.

Now look for Spotlight on the left, and uncheck Show Spotlight search to disable it from popping when pressing ⌘ + Space.

Now let's make Alfred open when pressing ⌘ + Space.
Open Alfred settings by opening Alfred and pressing ⌘ + ,

💡 Pro tip: most of macOS apps allow you to open their settings by pressing ⌘ + ,

Open the General tab and select a hotkey for opening Alfred.

And Alfred is ready for action 🎩🔥.

✨ Create Your First Custom Web Search

First, open Alfred's settings (open Alfred, then hit ⌘ + ,).

Go to the Features tab, then to the Web Search tab.

As you can see here, there are many web searches that are already defined by default.

If you like - you can edit the keywords used to trigger the custom web search by double clicking it (as I renamed youtube to yt for maximum efficiency 📈).

Now let's create a new custom web search, which is a very simple process.
The example we'll use is a custom search that searches icons in Iconfinder.

Iconfinder use a search query in their URL, very similar to our internal system in which I search for invoices daily.
For example - to search "car" on Iconfinder, I would need to navigate to:
https://www.iconfinder.com/search?q=car

See that little q=car at the end?
car is our query, and this is how we'll build our web search.

Click on the Add Custom Search on the bottom right corner of the table.

The window that opens contains of 4 important parts:

1. Search URL: The actual URL that will be used in the search. Note that {query} parameter, this will be replaced by anything you type after the keyword.
2. Title: The title of the search in Alfred's UI.
3. Keyword: What you need to write in Alfred's UI in order to provoke this web search.
4. Image (optional): The image that will be shown for that search in Alfred's UI.

These are my values for easy copying:

1. Search URL: https://www.iconfinder.com/search?q={query}
2. Title: Search Iconfinder for {query}
3. Keyword: icon
4. Image: The Iconfinder logo

That's it!
Just click Save and your first web search is ready for use!

Of course - you can go wild here.
I have over 50 custom web searches for our back office and monitoring tools, complex flows that I occasionally do and save me time, calendar, Gmail, GitHub, Gemini, ChatGPT, Google docs, and many more.
All of these save me lots of time every day, but most of all - make my workflow snappier and more fun.

📝 Final Notes

Alfred is one of those rare tools that starts out simple - just replacing Spotlight - but quickly becomes a core part of your workflow.

You don’t need to pay a cent to start getting serious value out of it.
The powerpack offers a lot of value, and I'll get deeper into it on another post.

Alfred doesn’t just make your Mac faster — it makes you faster.

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If you found this helpful, share it with a friend or teammate 🤝.
If you're feeling like supercharging your terminal as well - check out my article about it.
Want a walkthrough on Alfred’s clipboard manager or custom workflows? Let me know in the comments 👇.
And of course - stay tuned for future guides on Alfred and other productivity tools!