Robust Alfred #

Robust Alfred is an ecosystem of Alfred workflows designed to work predictably and fail safely.

Alfred is one of my favourite MacOS apps, with workflows making it an extremely powerful productivity tool. Not all workflows are built the same way, though, and it can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. There are no conventions to them, so they may behave wildly differently to others.

Robust Alfred is my endeavour to build workflows that feel like they were made to be used side-by-side. I'm not sure what works best just yet, but iterating with a common goal will get us there.

In addition to workflows, this site offers other Alfred goodies in much the same vein as Raycast's ray.so. Currently, these are custom web searches.

Why not just use Raycast? #

After many years using Alfred, I switched to Raycast for a few months. Raycast is fantastically uniform and keyboard-driven; in some ways it feels like a natural progression of the Alfred (or Quicksilver) paradigm.

I came back to Alfred in the end, after realising that for all Raycast's features, there were only a handful I actually used. Worse, Raycast isn't nearly as performant as Alfred, and it's one of the few tools on a machine I expect to be instant.

As for the features I miss, I figured I could rebuild them!

Why Rust? #

I wanted to choose a language that would allow us to break out of Alfred's constraints if needed, whilst remaining performant and feeling natural to develop for. Rust can do just about anything in a performant way, and once I discovered powerpack it seemed the natural choice.

The downside is that we need to execute compiled code, which means that on they either need to be built from source, be explicitly allowed via gatekeeper, or signed and notarised. The latter is planned, but I'm waiting to get an Apple dev licence under a new entity at the moment.

On LLM use #

Robust Alfred code is primarily written by LLMs.

Credits #

Many search icons are from SuperTinyIcons by Terence Eden (MIT). Logos are trademarks of their owners, shown only to identify the services; if you own one and want it removed, please email me.

The site's 🎩 icon is from Twemoji (CC-BY 4.0).

Robust Alfred is not associated with Alfred or Running with Crayons Ltd.