Alfred 5.5 What's New Composite Header

Alfred 5.5

Discover a whole new way to interact with Alfred, using beautiful rich and interactive views.

Text View

The new scriptable, editable text view offers rich Markdown support, expanding your Workflow abilities immensely. Create a simple note-taking app, or a fully functional ChatGPT / DALL-E integration.

Speaking of which, here's a fully functional ChatGPT / DALL-E integration:

ChatGPT running within Alfred Text View

The ChatGPT workflow will stream the output in real time, and allow for continued lead-on questions.

DALL-E running within Alfred Text View

Generate images as beautiful or bonkers as your imaginaion will allow!

Grid View

Present images, files and results in a customisable, scriptable view, with an optional filter input.

We've created a Memory Pairs game with Grid View; Play it here:

Memory Pairs workflow in Alfred Grid View

Disclaimer: This is the first time Alfred will make you unproductive.

Image View

View and browse images in a clean, maximisable view, navigating between them effortlessly.

Here is a useful workflow for interacting with your recently taken screenshots:

Multiple Images in Alfred Image View

All new views can be enlarged, toggle with ⌘0.

PDF View

Instantly view and interact with your PDFs within Alfred.

Yip Yip PDF in Alfred PDF View

Right click on the PDF View to get additional viewing options.

Rich File System Navigation

Bringing all these new features together, try our wonderful File Navigation workflow which makes use of all of these new features, the best way to navigate and preview your filesystem within Alfred.

Grid Based File Navigation within Alfred

"View in Alfred"

A ubiquitous new View in Alfred Universal Action to take advantage of these amazing new View features immediately, without the need to create your own workflows.

Quickly preview Markdown, images, PDFs, text files within Alfred, or directly from Finder.

Universal Actions view with View In Alfred selected

And so much more...

  • Overhaul the top level window / view framework to allow for the dynamic heights and widths of the new Workflow UI Components
  • New custom Markdown renderer for new Text View, Workflow "About" and Change Log
  • Update Recent Documents universal action to correctly load recents on macOS Sonoma
  • New Workflow JSON output key to cache script output for high performance
  • Workflow Editor now resolves keyword variables on input objects, rendered in italic
  • On running a Workflow, show clickable macOS Notification when Automation Tasks are missing
  • Added new "Unstack View" option to Hide Alfred workflow object
  • Holding ⌥ on the Alfred Gallery menu in the Workflow Editor will now give a "Fix Tools" option to fix broken Homebrew / Xcode instances
  • Too much to list here, view the View full Change Log.

The new interactive views add so much exciting flexibility to workflows; We can't wait to see how community creators use the Views in new and improved workflows!

How can I get Alfred 5.5?

This is a FREE UPDATE for ALL Alfred 5 Powerpack users.
Update to Alfred 5.5 from within Alfred, or download from our homepage.

Not a Powerpack user? Upgrade today!

Love what we're doing, and already have a Powerpack? Legendary+


Alfred 5 What's New Header

Alfred 5.0 What's New

Tonnes of useful new and improved features, making Alfred indispensable on your Mac...

New Workflow Editor

The Workflow Editor has been rewritten from the ground up to be higher performance, more efficient, user-friendly and accessible. We've added keyboard shortcuts, new mouse interactions, a customisable and searchable palette, and VoiceOver accessibility of Workflow contents and editing.

Alfred 5's New Workflow Editor view

Workflows can now be created using keyboard shortcuts, including searching for and inserting workflow objects into the canvas. We've also added a new ⌥click paradigm which allows you to quickly connect, multi-connect or chain-connect workflow objects.

Workflow Palette and Search

The new Workflow Palette gives you an easy way to navigate, discover and use the broad range of workflow objects available. Simply drag an object from the Palette into the canvas, or hold ⌥ and drag to automatically connect to the currently selected objects.

Add your most-used objects to the Palette Favourites list for quick access, or search and filter the Palette instantly with the / shortcut. Use ↩︎ to add the searched item to the canvas, or ⌥↩︎ to insert and automatically connect.

Alfred 5's Workflow Palettes

Configure the Palette to be full, compact, or hidden to suit your workspace. Even when hidden, the Palette Search will be dynamically available when needed.

Workflow Prefabs

Prefabs enable you to save pre-configured objects, or groups of connected objects, into the Palette. You can then reuse these throughout your workflows just like any other workflow object, saving you time and effort.

Alfred 5's Example Prefab

In the future, we will add the ability to export and share your Prefabs!

Workflow User Configuration

Workflow creators can now add simple user-facing preferences to workflows, making them easier for users to install and set up. The Workflow readme supports a subset of Markdown, so you can style your workflow introduction and help.

Use easy text fields, checkboxes, selection lists, file pickers and more to allow users to configure a workflow without having to navigate into individual objects or scripts!

User Configuration for a Workflow

Configuration items can have default values, or can be marked as required, ensuring the user has configured the workflow before it can be used. User values are automatically migrated on updating a workflow.

Automation Tasks

This is the start of something amazing...

Alfred's new Automation Task object

Alfred's Automation Task object adds an ever-growing collection of configurable actions you can add to your workflows as building blocks, without having to think about the code behind it; From resizing images and moving files to getting the current Safari tab or switching to Dark Mode.

The Automation Task collection is aimed at both non-developers, and advanced workflow creators alike. We develop, maintain and enhance the repository of underlying actions, you simply add them to your workflow.

Alfred's new Automation Tasks object configuration

In the future, we will release our task development tool enabling our community to create task actions too!

Run macOS Shortcuts

Run macOS Shortcuts in your Workflows

It's now possible run macOS Shortcuts as part of your Workflows.

Requires macOS 12+

Accessibility & Keyboard-based Workflow Editing

This is part of our ongoing commitment to make Alfred more accessible and better suited for use with the VoiceOver and Accessibility macOS features.

In addition to the Palette Search and Workflow User Configuration, both of which were conceived with Accessibility in mind, Workflows can now be edited and navigated using the keyboard.

Use ⌘arrows to move between objects on the canvas, or ⌘⌥left or ⌘⌥right to navigate forward and back through connected objects. Navigate to sibling objects using ⌘⌥up or ⌘⌥down.

With VoiceOver enabled, Alfred will be reading the object and connection details as you navigate.

Improved Ubiquitous Search

Alfred's Ubiquitous search has received more improvements, making it easy to get to a specific preference keyword or snippet directly, and even create a new workflow directly from Alfred's main bar.

Alfred main bar with question mark trigger search

And so much more...

Boost your everyday productivity in every way with many more new features and improvements:

  • We've added Interactive Getting Started guides to introduce new users to the Workflow Editor and walk them through creating their first workflows
  • Redesigned icons to make workflow objects even easier to recognise
  • Many new objects to allow you to write even more code-free workflows, including Conditional objects, a Speech output and a Running Apps filter
  • The Workflow list can now be resized to more easily see long workflow names
  • Workflow connections can now be disabled in a workflow, preventing Alfred from following that stream when running the workflow
  • Improved Workflow object snapping and sizing
  • Contextual help in more places throughout the workflow editor
  • The Workflow Debugger can be opened and run regardless of a workflow being opened
  • Added Workflow Object alignment options to horizontally or vertically align the selected objects, centred, or references around clicked object
  • Improved workflow connection click detection, including improved hit zones for alt-connection hints
  • Improved colours for hotkey highlighting when sharing combo with other workflows, including disabled ones
  • Workflow object notes can now be edited by double clicking them
  • Swift and Python 3 have been added to the available script selections (may trigger Apple Developer CLI Tools automatic install)
  • External Trigger objects can now optionally be run from the alfred: URL scheme
  • Snippet Triggers can now optionally be shown in the Clipboard / Snippets viewer
  • The Script Filter object has a new `skipknowledge` boolean field in the JSON, preventing Alfred from sorting your outputted results when using UIDs for reselection
  • New word matching framework for higher performance, and more intelligent boundary matching when using e.g. Script and List filters
  • The {query} placeholder can now have modifiers performed on it e.g. {query.trim.lowercase}
  • Added {const:} access to Alfred workflow constants, previously only available to the Scripting environment
  • Alfred now defaults to using the Dark / Light Modern themes to better match macOS
  • Improved URL handling throughout Alfred
  • Improved text view undo algorithm to break coalescing on non-alphanumeric breaks instead of timing
  • Add custom Alfred accent colour to Preferences UI, for improved experience on Big Sur+
  • Improved icon rendering across the board
  • Larger hit zones for buttons at the bottom of the Workflows, Themes and Remote Pages lists
  • Improved macOS Colour palette behaviour in theme editor when changing colour options
  • New option to allow resetting of colour, size and font in rich text snippets
  • Separate icons for Snippets and Snippet Collections for UI clarity
  • Enable drag and drop of snippets between collections in the preferences
  • Reveal in Finder Universal Action now works with multiple file selections

Read the Full Alfred 5 Change Log to all changes.

Looking for Alfred 4's What's New?

Download Alfred 5 Get Alfred 5 Powerpack

Version 5.5 b2257 (macOS 10.14+, 64-bit Intel, Apple Silicon).

Latest Blog Post:

Alfred 5.5 Released: Exciting New Workflow Views for Richer Interactions

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