Alfred and Web Development

Fellow web developer and all around awesome guy Adam Clark, put together two fantastic screencasts on his blog which demonstrate the power of Alfred and how to enhance common front-end workflows. Inspired by his post, I thought I would start sharing some tips on how I use Alfred throughout the day.

I use Alfred 57.4 times a day. It's awesome, so awesome that it has replaced Spotlight on my Mac. I have two custom searches that relate directly to front-end development, a Mozilla Developer Documentation custom search, and a Can I use custom search. These shortcuts allow me to:

  1. Invoke Alfred
  2. Type "cani" or "mdn" followed by a space.
  3. Type my query, i.e. "background-size"
  4. Hit Enter and see the resulting documentation or caniuse page for the query.

Here are the actual URLs as I set them up in Alfred: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q={query} http://caniuse.com/#search={query}

This is a simple thing to setup, and it probably only saves a few seconds, but it feels friction-less which is the whole point of using Alfred.

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