Alfred 4.5 brings a new Powerpack feature; Universal Actions. Take any text, URLs or files and perform actions on them from anywhere within Alfred or on your Mac using your Universal Action hotkey.
With the new Universal Actions, you can select text in your browser, a URL in an email or a file on your Desktop and pop up Alfred's Actions panel to choose what to do with your content. Start anywhere and jump into action.
Set your hotkey in Alfred’s Preferences > Features > Universal Actions to get started.
If you're already familiar with Alfred's File Actions, you can use the same hotkey you previously used for files for Universal Actions.
Universal Actions is also deeply integrated throughout Alfred.
You can show the actions panel from Alfred's results, File Navigation, and even Clipboard History. Use the Global hotkey, or more conveniently, tap the Alfred actions shortcut to see the available actions.
Alfred offers over 60 built-in actions, such as copying to your Clipboard, saving as a Snippet, searching the web, showing recent documents for an app or extracting URLs from a block of text.
The Universal Actions panel only shows you the relevant actions for the type of item you've selected. Quickly filter down the actions by typing part of the action name.
You can take advantage of Alfred's powerful Workflows to create your own actions, from the simplest text transformation to the most advanced script. You can string multiple actions one after the other without leaving Alfred.
Alfred will automatically include your Workflow Keyword and Script Filter objects as built-in actions. For ultimate control, you can create specific Universal Action triggers where you need them within your Workflows.
We've included a built-in workflow to show you how Universal Actions work within workflows. To install the workflow, open Alfred's Workflow preferences and select
[+] > Getting Started > Universal Actions.
Fast and direct hotkey access to useful actions for the current macOS selection such as Open with, Copy, Move, Email and Recent Documents.
The Alfred 4.5 release adds more than just Universal Actions; There are performance, Workflow and usability improvements throughout!
Want to see every single new feature and improvement? Take a look at the Change log or pop by Alfred 4's Update tab in the preferences.
Download Alfred 4 to get started! Grab a Powerpack license, or upgrade your existing license, and let's go!
"Alfred" is a registered trademark of Running with Crayons Ltd. ©2025 Running with Crayons Ltd. All rights reserved.