All except Butler also have mechanisms for adding plugins in order to extend searches to include items such as 1Password logins and Transmit favorites.Īll the launchers become smarter as you use them. For example, you can ask them to look at only specific files or folders, or perform specialized Web searches for, say, Twitter users or IMDB entries.
#Butler for mac full
(You can see the full list of search categories in System Preferences > Spotlight >, where you can also disable or reorder the categories as you see fit.) Alfred, Butler, LaunchBar, and Quicksilver display and open most of the same data types as Spotlight, but offer much more configurability.
#Butler for mac movie
In Yosemite, Spotlight displays most results (including Wikipedia pages, movie trailers, maps, and so on) right in its pop-up window. In addition, Spotlight can search the Web (via Bing), perform currency conversions, show Dictionary definitions, and more. (If you want to use more than one launcher at the same time, that’s fine too, as long as each has a different keyboard shortcut.) What you can find and open The word launcher implies that you’ll be opening apps, and all the launchers (including Spotlight) prioritize apps in their search results.īut Spotlight can find and open nearly anything on your Mac, including documents, folders, System Preferences panes, Mail messages, iTunes tracks, and contacts. Similarly, each of the non-Apple launchers has a default keyboard shortcut involving the Spacebar (LaunchBar uses Command-Spacebar, the same as Spotlight for Alfred, it’s Option-Spacebar for Butler and Quicksilver, it’s Control-Spacebar), but you can change this to whatever you prefer-just make sure your chosen launcher doesn’t conflict with Spotlight. Spotlight uses the Command-Spacebar shortcut by default, but you can change it if you like by going to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Spotlight >, double-clicking the keyboard shortcut next to Show Spotlight Search, and pressing a new key combination. You can disable or rearrange categories for Spotlight searches in this preference pane. For example, the complete sequence of keystrokes to open Mail might be Command-Spacebar, “m,” Return. When the item you want is highlighted, you press Return to open it. You can narrow down the list of matches by typing more characters or by using the arrow keys to select something other than the first item in the list. You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. Choosing the right launcher for your Mac. Here's how four popular options (Launchbar, Alfred, Butler, and Quicksilver) stack up.
(In some cases, you can also click a menu bar icon.) Then, you start typing the name of whatever you want to launch, and potential matches appear in a list. First, you press a keyboard shortcut, such as Command-Spacebar, to open a pop-up search window. Get used to keyboard commands With all these launchers, the primary usage pattern is the same.
#Butler for mac mac
Each of these lets you open items on your Mac without knowing where they are (or even exactly what they’re named), and they all share a number of other useful core features. We also take Spotlight into consideration, which is built into OS X and can do many of the same things. In this roundup, we put four all-purpose, keyboard-based launchers to the test: Running with Crayons’ (free, but £17/$26 for the highly recommended Powerpack option), Many Tricks’ ($20), Objective Development’s ($29), and the Quicksilver Project’s open-source (free). You can save tremendous amounts of time and energy by using a launcher utility instead, which can open apps and files, as well as perform calculations, search the Web, run scripts, and do all sorts of other laborsaving tricks. If you’re still manually digging around in folders looking for apps to launch and documents to open, it’s time to stop.
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