Alfred is one of those must have tools every engineer needs for improved productivity. There is so much this one application provides that I definitely don’t have time to explain in one article alone. Instead, I want to focus on Alfred’s Snippets feature.
To provide more context, Alfred Snippets allow you to expand common text, phrases, templates, and so forth with only a few keystrokes. If you use Sublime Text Snippets or even the custom code snippets in the Sublime Text Setup project, you’ll be at home with Alfred Snippets. Alfred Snippets is one my most heavily used features and even my usage statistic support this claim. The following was captured just before the Native American Heritage Day holiday:
The blue line, regarding expansion usage, is what you want to pay attention to. I definitely use Alfred a lot. So let’s dive into how you can leverage this feature and improve your workflow too! 🎉
Setup
To get started, you’ll want to follow these steps:
💡 Alternatively — also my favorite way — you can access your snippets by popping up Alfred via
your global hotkey (i.e. COMMAND + SPACE), typing ?snippets,
and ENTER.
Usage
While viewing your snippet collections, you can add new collections or delete existing collections at any time by clicking on either the plus (+) or minus (-) symbols at the bottom of the Snippets window. Here’s a screenshot of what creating a new collection looks like:
…and here’s what an existing collection looks like:
In my case, you are looking at my Markdown collection which has a semicolon prefix and icon. The icon is important for visually distinguishing between all of your collections. As for the prefix, I’ll expand upon this shortly.
Next, I will provide some customization tips which might be of interest. You can also read the official documentation for further details.
Customization
Out of the box, the defaults are pretty good but you might want to make a few tweaks. For example, here is a screenshot of what my snippets configuration looks like:
I’ll use on my Markdown collection for demonstration purposes to keep things simple. I’ve also added numbered stamps (blue background with white numbers) to walk you through each section of the above screenshot.
(1) Snippet Keyword
The default snippets keyword is snip but I like to use s to search through my snippets. The s
also doubles as my default Web Search trigger which happens to be Duck
Duck Go and is why Duck Duck Go appears at the top of the list. By using s, especially for
searching snippets, this allows me to type COMMAND + SPACE to
launch Alfred and then type s + SPACE to search. Example:
All of my snippets use a semicolon prefix. I’ll explain in more detail later but, for now, notice how nice it is to search through existing snippets. Hitting the ENTER key on any selected snippet will trigger the snippet.
(2) Matching
When not using the above snippet keyword, I use the Name, Keyword, or Snippet option to trigger a snippet. This is how I almost always trigger a snippet. The most important part is ensuring this selection is word based so Alfred expands the snippet once the full word-based macro is typed out to properly trigger the corresponding snippet.
(3) Automatically Expand Snippets By Keyword
You definitely want this option checked in order to teach Alfred to trigger snippets within any macOS application. This is unchecked by default because you need to enable macOS Accessibility for Alfred first but is definitely worth enabling. You can do this by launching System Preferences, clicking on Security & Privacy, and then clicking Accessibility. You’ll want to make sure Alfred is checked as shown below:
(4) Collections
My Markdown collection — including all other collections — uses a semicolon prefix (;) to
trigger each snippet. I keep dancing around why the semicolon is important and promise to explain
why shortly.
(5) Snippets
Here we can see the details of my Markdown collection in terms of snippet name, whether snippets are enabled or not, the keyword macro used to trigger each snippet, and what the snippet will output when triggered. If we double click on one of these, like my Markdown Link for instance, we can then view the details of this particular snippet:
I use the {cursor} placeholder often because it’s quite handy to have my cursor placed exactly
where I need it to fill in additional information. Should you want something more than just a cursor
placeholder, you can insert dynamic placeholders within your snippets too. Here’s a brief look at
what is possible:
Guidelines
Now that you’ve got a rough sense of how to get setup and customized with Alfred, let’s detail a few guidelines worth following when building your own custom snippets. The trick to making Alfred Snippets powerful is to:
-
Use semicolons as your prefix for all snippets to prevent accidental snippet expansion.
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Use single or double (rare) characters for namespaces.
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Use mnemonic macros with as few characters as possible while remaining memorable, much like you’d do with your Dotfiles aliases and functions.
Let’s break the above down further.
Semicolons
For example purposes, I’ll focus on the English language but the pattern can be applied to any language as best makes sense. With English, at least, there is never a sentence that begins with a semicolon: ;. Even better, a semicolon doesn’t require a modifier key (i.e. COMMAND, CONTROL, OPTION, etc.) to type. So you can use your right pinky finger to type the semicolon with minimal effort.
For example, let’s say you are writing a Markdown document and want to include a Ruby code block. I would then type following key sequence:
; + m + d + b
…to yield the following snippet:
``` ruby ```
What’s nice about the above is that I’m using the semicolon (;) to denote the
start of my snippet followed by the m and d keys to denote the
[m]ark[d]own namespace finally followed by the b key which is short for [code]
block. When all of these keys are used in combination, my snippet is triggered which results in my
Markdown code block being expanded. I can then fill in actual Ruby code for documentation purposes
to complete my snippet.
The important aspect of this design is that using a semicolon to denote a snippet macro (i.e.
;mdb) is invalid English. The possibility of ;mdb ever showing up as a word or naturally in a
sentence is zero. This also means you won’t cause a snippet to accidentally trigger and expand.
Namespaces
Now that you know to use semicolons as snippet prefixes, the next thing you want to do is namespace
your snippet collections. With my Markdown collection, I use md as the namespace. This
helps organize and ensure each snippet collection is unique to prevent any namespace collisions. The
good news is when Alfred detects a snippet collision, you’ll see the errant snippet displayed as red
text which is helpful for debugging purposes.
Not all snippets need to be namespaced, though. For example, when it comes to symbols, I’ll use words instead of namespacing:
-
;apple-  -
;copyright- © -
;trademark- â„¢
As mentioned earlier, the semicolon prefix and unique trigger is all that matters. If you can use a namespace, then do it. Otherwise, it can make sense to use only unique words too.
Mnemonics
By this point you are starting to see how I build mnemonics into all snippets. You can put a lot of
power into triggering your snippets with only a few key strokes. While I’ve only shown the use of
;md for Markdown snippets, here are a few more examples:
-
;g- Git. -
;h- HTML. -
;sr- Slack Reactions. -
;ss- Slack Statuses.
Returning to Markdown, this means you can leverage the ;md namespace to start organizing your
snippets as follows:
-
;mda- Markdown Action. Expands to- []to create a next action (i.e. TODO) list. -
;mdc- Markdown Code. Expands to`{cursor}`to create inline code.
Hopefully this helps demonstrate how one can quickly build up simple mnemonics that are easy to remember and use with minimal keystrokes.
Downloads
The following are several of my custom snippets which you can download and install for yourself. Each demonstrates what I’ve discussed above. Plus you can use these as examples to incorporate within your workflow directly or experiment further. Follow these steps to use any of these snippets:
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Click on each link to download or open within Alfred.
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Once downloaded, double click on the file to install into Alfred.
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You can delete the downloaded file once installed.
You can always view any installed snippet by popping up Alfred and typing: ?snippets plus
ENTER. Feel free pick and choose or download and use all of the following
snippets:
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Code Review - Provides code review templates and utilities.
-
Credit Cards - Useful when filling in valid or invalid VISA cards for testing purposes.
-
DateTime - Useful when needing different date/time formats.
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Emoji - Useful with services that can translate text to emoji.
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HTML - Useful when working in HTML.
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Slack - Useful when communicating with others in Slack.
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Symbols - Useful when needing common symbols in chat or documentation.
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Text - Useful when dealing with text.
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Tracker - Useful when creating epics or issues within your issue tracker. These snippets default to Markdown syntax.
Conclusion
I hope the following has been of help to you and will level you up further. Whenever you find yourself repeating the same text over and over, think about crafting a snippet and save yourself some time. You’ll be glad you did.