Alfred's Fuzzy Search, … Finally!

Hi, my name is Patrick. I’m an app horder and I run way to many apps. You need proof? Well, I run my favorite launchers, Alfred and LaunchBar, parallel (= at the same time).

I’m going to publish a separate post on this at some point, so that know why on earth someone is willing to force double the memory consumption on his poor old Mac. But today is ‘Alfred Day’.

Alfred, the trustworthy butler for all things Mac, has now arrived on Version 2.4. Along with it comes some cosmetic polish like a new default OS X Yosemite Light and Dark theme, a sharper status bar icon which respects Yosemite theming, a bit of window blur and lastly the obligatory follow the leader font-family: "Helvetica Neue" typography¹.

That’s all nice and good, but for me there’s one point in the change log I’ve been eagerly awaiting and bugging the developers about constantly:

New option to fuzzy match file system navigation results, on by default in Alfred’s Features > File Search > Navigation options

YES!

As a LaunchBar guy I’m used to this behavior for ages and I couldn’t understand how any Alfred user could put up with it and navigate to his files successfully without getting annoyed. Admitted, there’s a chance that me being a scatterbrain is to blame for that I often can remember only parts of the folder I’m looking for. Normally Alfred should figure out what destination I’m trying to reach if I teach it well enough. Still, this hasn’t worked for me. And in the end, the app should make it as easy as possible for me to reach my target folder.

If you’re not completely sure what I’m talking about I put together a little screencast with my friend Daniel from the UK.

PS: Since I’m going to write that LaunchBar + Alfred article anyway, feel free to email or tweet me your favorite features or the reason why you decided to use one or the other app.