Alfred as main engine for everything, and from Alfred I trigger KM Workflows for some advanced stuff Alfred cannot do (or I do not know how to do it in Alfred). But I love the main bar of Alfred for everything. Also search within DT or Drive from Alfred bar.
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I just realized what is probably the one major negative to Raycast: Raycast relies on Spotlight. Alfred does not.
I long ago disabled Spotlight indexing because at times it would slow down my computer absurdly.
I will give it a try again with Raycast so I can compare Raycast vs. Alfred again - but the need to run Spotlight definitely is not a plus in my book.
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It’s a shame that Alfred doesn’t do window management. The Raycast app looks like it’s nice for that. I bought Moom but I don’t use it as well as I could.
One thing that annoys me about Alfred’s clipboard history is that you press opt CMD c to open the history, which to me makes no sense! It should be opt CMD v. It makes me hesitate every time!
This thread has been really informative, thank you for sharing how you’re using things and making me realise how much more I need to learn 
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I’m just trying to learn about universal actions from this post and your comment here caught my eye. Does this mean if you highlight text you can choose an action that saves the text in Asana?
I use NotePlan as my task management app nowadays, and one thing that disappoints me is there is no “quick add” function. (I was on Todoist before where I could just click a shortcut to send something to my inbox - I miss that!). Currently when I need to add something to NotePlan I copy and paste it myself, and perhaps also copy a link to the message so I can find it again. If I’ve understood your workflow correctly, Alfred can do this for me if I set it up right?
Go to Alfred Preferences > Features > Clipboard History and set the Viewer Hotkey that you want.
Edit: Apologies—did not see the earlier reply before posting!
Stephen
Poor Quicksilver, barely any votes. I have fond memories of procrastinating from schoolwork by fiddling with my Quicksilver setup back in the mid-aughts when that app was the rage. It changed the way I use computers.
I use Alfred now. It works, but never felt as smooth as Quicksilver. Tried Launchbar and Raycast but they did not stick for me … I could not grasp their “logic”. By which I almost mean their “grammar”. Quicksilver had such a clear grammar: subject, verb, object. I think it’s why it felt so natural to use.
I speak of Quicksilver in the past tense, but they are still updating it … just, seems not to have been updated enough, yet.
I also use Keyboard Maestro and BetterTouchTool, but not as launchers.
On my PC, I use Flow Launcher, which I link to in case anyone else needs a Windows alternative (took me a long time to find one that was satisfactory).
I have been using Quicksilver for more years than I can count (almost 
). I still stand by it to this day. It was really ground-breaking and I’ve implemented it in more than one corporation in my time.
And nice shoutout for Flow Launcher. Hadn’t seen that one - and only use my PC for some incidental support tasks nowadays, but that looks like it’s worth a play about. 
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There is an Alfred workflow you can install for NotePlan which includes quick add: GitHub - beet/alfred_noteplan_actions: Alfred workflow for handy Noteplan actions
Don’t know how well it works as I haven’t tried it.
Keyboard Maestro
Yes. It is done via the Asana Alfred workflow. Via universal action the function is very limited though, you have to add in details later within Asana but it is enough for me for quick entry.
I’m unfamiliar with NotePlan’s automation capability. Maybe you can look into the NotePlan’s workflow that another user has shared above. By the way the workflow was last updated in Nov 2020, it might not work but should give you some ideas. I think this also makes the criticism on the state of Alfred’s workflow very valid.
@rkaplan @Stephen_C Thank you both, I am now sorted, having nicely demonstrated that I really don’t know how Alfred works! It’s great that it’s so customisable though.
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Thank you for sharing this, I will give it a go. How did you find this, out of interest? I searched in the Alfred forum but didn’t find anything; is there a central list somewhere of available Alfred workflows?
I’ve seen the comments in this thread that Raycast is better for extensions being kept up to date. Is there something they do differently to ensure that third party extensions continue working, or is it just a quirk of their community? I am unsure if this is a good reason to switch apps.
AFAIK: not yet. They’re currently collecting proposals for a centralized repository (in the sense of “link collection”, I guess).
I can’t comment on that, not using Raycast. OTOH, a working workflow would not really require to be kept up to date. One problem I see with many Alfred workflows is their usage of Python. This introduces a dependency on third-party software, which possibly needs to be installed and kept up to date, too. And as was/is the case with these Alfred workflows, updating this third-party software might break the stuff depending on it.
But: Raycast’s integration of AppleScript-ing relies on Node, NPM and a particular Node module. Even more third-party dependencies. And reliance on a module that may or may not be kept up to date …
I’m not saying that one approach is better than the other. I’m just saying that Alfred and Raycast attempt to do similar things and have to work around similar technological limitations/decisions. Raycast is definitely more modern.
I hear you, but Python is provided as part of macOS…
It still is, I know. And it got upgraded behind the scenes, which broke many Alfred workflows. And Apple officially said that they’ll stop automatically providing runtimes of scripting languages:
I just did a search in the Workflows section of Alfred’s website.
This workflow works great, thank you for finding it for me!
I’ve used Spotlight for years, but recently Ventura introduced some features which I don’t find useful and in doing so made it harder to do the things Spotlight was really good at. So, I’ve switched to Alfred, which is a bit clunkier than the old Spotlight, but better than the new one. (I haven’t bothered with the more advanced Alfred features yet.)
Spotlight used to be perfect for workflows of the type:
Cmd-space s TAB ↓, which translates to Show me the last few Scrivener documents and open the one before last.
Now this brings up a QuickLook panel which is unreachable with the keyboard, which forces use to use the mouse — and the whole point of using a keyboard launcher is… Well, the clue is is in the name.
Of course I could search for the file by name, but that requires a bit more effort. Alfred is just as bad, but at least they haven’t annoyed me by taking away something which worked perfectly and replaced it with something shiny which doesn’t.
Well, you can Alfred make do what you want. Which requires some fiddling around, but it’s possible.