I started using Alfred back in 2014 and It’s been a critical part of my Mac OS workflow ever since. I’m not going to get into everything that’s magical about Alfred because I could ramble way too long about that. Today let’s focus on one particular trick for Alfred which is Bookmarks.
I use Alfred to open Applications all of the time by tapping Option + Space and typing the application I am looking for, but more and more often the applications I use each day are in my web browser, especially the ones that I work on and have to administer. Often times there are unique URLs for pages I use, but maybe only once or twice a month.
Wherever possible I want to remove looking from things from my workflow and instead I want to be able to find and launch those things as quickly as I can think of them. What I’ve found recently is I can organize my bookmarks by my logical name for them. Basically what I would call them.
If I wanted to get to:
- the active sprint view in Jira can just type Active
- Calendar for Google Calendar
- Any commonly used page for work I can put all of those things in a Bookmark folder and call upon them in Alfred.
To set it up, just open your Alfred Preferences and then choosing Web Bookmarks Mark sure your preferred browser is checked and mark sure it’s set to in Default Results. This last option is just personal preference.
From here, Alfred can access your browser’s bookmarks and keeps them in sync. If you add a new bookmark just hit Option + Space to open Alfred and then press escape and by the time you open it the next time your newly added bookmark will be there.
Ever since I learned this trick, I feel like I can now get to all the places on my Mac that I want as soon as I think of them. Previously, this was only possible for applications.