At the beginning of this month, the popular launch utility for macOS, Alfred released a significant feature addition with their update to version 4.5 - Universal Actions

Universal Actions allow you to carry out specific actions on data that you select - so this could be some text on a web page you are reading or capturing a URL. Maybe you’ve returned a file from a search with Alfred and want to carry out some specific actions on it? With over 60 actions available by default, there is the scope to make some significant improvements to workflows on macOS. 

How Does It Work?

When you’ve installed the update, open Alfred Preferences and you’ll see a new section within Features - and that’s Universal Actions. 

Here, there are two distinct sections - General and Actions. 

General essentially runs through how to access the Universal Actions. 

1 - Show Actions - when you return a result through Alfred from a standard search, this determines which key can be pressed to bring up a list of actions you can perform. 

2 - Selection Hotkey - If you were to select some text on a webpage, or within a document, for example, this is the hotkey that will bring up the Universal Action menu. I’ve shown the default hotkey in the image below however it clashes with my default 1Password hotkey, so you may need to modify this. 

3 - Action Ordering - there is a default order to the displayed actions, however ticking this will sort them in the order that they are mostly used. 

The Actions section covers exactly what can be accessed from within Universal Actions and there are a lot. An awful lot. 

In the left window, you can see the default ones and you can check/uncheck these as required. These are all text, file and URL based and will only ever appear in that context. So below, I’ve got two images. The left one shows me invoking the Universal Actions menu on a file - whereas the left, shows it when highlighting this text. Very distinct options are available.

In the right-hand sidebar here, you can add some more actions, So Workflow File and Universal Actions will be shown (if applicable) within Universal Actions, as well as Custom and Web Searches. You can see, in fact, on the right-hand image that I have an option there to search for the text within ScreenCasts Online. This is because I created a custom web search within Alfred and, with this check box marked, I can carry out the search via Universal Actions. 

Over the course of the coming months, I know I”m going to be using this more and I’ll certain chart my progress with it. My next stage is to see how it works with Workflows. 

For now, it saves some time and keystrokes and I”m always happy about that.