I installed Alfred on Sunday, and am trying to adjust.
For all of the Alfred-switchers in here - does anyone else find the folder navigation pretty unintuitive? Or am I doing it wrong?
LaunchBar / QS's approach:
Type "Documents" to bring up folder, use up & down to select things, and left or right arrows to drill into them. Typing anything searches everything within the current folder. So intuitive to me!
Alfred:
"Documents" brings up folder, Command+Down(?) to open it. Then use up & down to select things, and Command+Down to drill in. If you want to say, open a folder in Finder, you have to hit Command+O or "Enter" and "Enter". You can search but only by the first letters in the filename (not "pdf") .
So for your converts - what's the deal, do you prefer this style, am I doing it wrong, or do you just get used to it..?
I couldn't adjust. Alfred may not be trying to be Quicksilver, but where it does go its own way it feels actively worse.
Everything in QS is very regular, Object-Verb style interaction with fuzzy completion of both. Alfred has a wartier, more irregular interaction model: it's Verb-Object if you want to type the verb, but it seems to push you into command key combos, which operate on a Object-Verb basis, and there doesn't feel like much logic as to what's available as what.
Have you tried using the right arrow to go into your Documents folder?
E.g. Type "docu", Documents shows up as top results, right arrow, then pick your action either by arrow down or cmd + number.
If all you want to do is open a folder, prefix your search term by "open" or hit the spacebar first (shortcut for "open"). If you want to reveal it in Finder, just type "find" first, and if you want to search inside files, just type "in" first.
If you give Alfred a chance (and accept that it isn't trying to be Quicksilver), you'll really get into a groove with it.
Cmd-Down open folders and launches apps/docs in Finder too. I've never used Cmd-O/Enter for that task. To me, Alfred seems much more consistent with my use of OSX key commands than Quicksilver's left/right/tab/enter scheme.
This update fixes proxy objects, which is huge. I haven't seen any other program come close to QS's flexibility. I can do "Current Selection > Search/Email/etc.", "Current Application > Show Menu", all kinds of cool stuff.
The last example shows all the menu items for the app in quicksilver, so I can search through it. Kind of like the search box in the app's help menu, but faster and easier (just make sure to bind that action to a key).
Select an item in finder, press [alt-cmd-space] and type "email", [tab], then type the name of the person (QS searches your address book) and then hit enter to send off.
EDIT: Not very stable though...crashed it just now when trying to use the proxy select to append to file.
I like Alfred quite a bit, but if this is a serious attempt to develop quicksilver back into relevance, I'm going to have to give the new version a try. Just to tinker, if nothing else.
To me, QS was more powerful, but Alfred was more polished.
I changed to LaunchBar (http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/) about a year ago. No complaints so far and I also like supporting an independent developer.
It's an excellent free (but not open source) and complete Triggers replacement that has none of the bugs of Quicksilver's implementation.
Once I had a keyboard shortcut manager, I was happy to switch to LaunchBar, whose author, among other things, is also the creator of Little Snitch, an amazing interactive outbound firewall.
I just switched back to Quicksilver after trying Alfred for a bit. The basic reason was that Quicksilver's search is better and more easily customised: it finds the things I'm looking for, and given that the whole point of using such things is to improve one's productivity (by cutting out the whole "Open Finder, dig down through the file hierarchy, finally manage to open the file, directory or application being searched for" process), it doesn't really matter to me how well its competitors do in other areas.
These days I can't tell the difference in speed between QS and Spotlight. Lion will also make that a bit faster and each entry a little nicer. I do miss the "verb" concept in QS, but I'd rather than it'd do a spotlight search and then overlay on that instead of implement it's own index.
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.
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.
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).
Spotlight opens files, does math, and gives definitions. Quicksilver does everything. It's based on an object/action system where you pick an object and do something to/with it.
There are all sorts of actions, from relaunching apps, deleting, emailing, or moving files, running scripts (I use get ip frequently), reading text, etc. It also gives fast access to some non-file things, like address book cards (right arrow to drill in to contact information, which let's you make new emails).
There are addons for a lot of things like bookmarks for various browsers, mouse gesture triggers, Cyberduck bookmarks, etc. It's fantastic if you prefer a keyboard over mousing.
You can't do the <object> <verb> thing. I agree though, the "death" of Quiksilver for me was when Apple introduced Spotlight in 10.5. 90% of what I used QS for was opening files, folders and apps.
too bad the spinoff project within google, Quick Search Box (same guy who started quick silver was involved), didn't really ever gain traction and has not been actively developed in a while, it had promise:
Actually the Quick Search Box maintainer (dmaclach) posted on Google Groups that Quick Search Box is basically dead in the water, and no longer funded by Google. Apparently most of the former team are now working on Chrome:
I've stuck with QuickSilver throughout, just because it's what I am used to and most comfortable using. Compared to the other apps that I have tried (Alfred, Spotlight), QuickSilver seems to get the most done with the least amount of effort -- it's simple to learn, harder to master, yet still extremely intuitive.
That's good news - does anyone else know what to do about the problem with the Shelf plugin and the Shelf popping up unwanted all the time? (whenever windows or apps are closed, perhaps even when they are opened sometimes, sometimes when quicksilver is invoked - very flaky)
Anyone know if I have to have a plugin installed to use the "Latest Download" and other proxy objects? Nothing seems to come up for me when I type that.
