HD Search - optimal Setup

[Guy]

I have always had difficulty with searching my HD... i pretty much get nothing that gives me any indication i can even search the drive on my Mac... Can someone give me an idea of the optimal setup for a search criteria setup please ?

[deanishe]

It's hard to give you any specific advice because your description is pretty vague.

 

Generally speaking, Alfred is not designed to be used like Spotlight. The Alfred Way is to (a) keep the default search limited to only the most important, most commonly-used stuff, then (b) create additional, highly-targeted searches for specific directories and/or filetypes using File Filters.

 

That is to say, if you have a bunch of PDF files you regularly search, you shouldn’t include PDFs in Alfred’s default search scope/results. Instead, you should create a separate search (with keyword pdf, perhaps) using a File Filter that’s configured to show only PDF files.

 

Highly-targeted/restricted searches are what let Alfred retrieve results sooo much faster than Spotlight and quickly learn to push just the right result to the top for any given query.

 

You can smush everything into the default search if you really want to, but you're really not going to get the most out of Alfred that way. You'll lose all the search speed gains vs Spotlight, and you'll need to use much longer queries to uniquely identify items when there are hundreds of thousands of them to choose from, not just hundreds.

Edited August 13, 2021 by deanishe

[GuiB]

I like to use the "Quick File Search mode" to rapidly get to a file by its name and most often I get what I want especially if it's a file that has been used recently. To access this mode, make sure to have it active in your Alfred Preferences at `Features -> File Search -> Quick Search [x]`. You have access to it from a standard Alfred search but by prefixing your search term with ' character or typing the spacebar.