6.1 Advanced Settings

Okay, let's take a look at Alfred's advanced settings.

The first is the application cache.

So Alfred has a cache of data he keeps to make it run faster.

Sometimes if that gets corrupt, things get a little wonky.

You just press this button and reset it.

I had not pressed this button in years, but I did halfway through building this course because I think resetting my database to build the course caused some wonkiness with my cache.

I pushed that button and it fixed it right up.

A more extreme version of that is rebuilding the Mac OS metadata, which goes even further.

I've never pushed that in relation to Alfred.

For your history, Alfred stores your typed queries.

And you can use Control-Arrow-Up and -Down to change that or access them.

I honestly don't use that often, but I do keep it checked.

They also have the ability to keep your latest query for up to five minutes.

I definitely don't like that.

When I have it turned on, it seems like it's more of a disruption than a help.

Now, as we've gone through the course, I've mentioned several times how Alfred remembers what you pick and surfaces those toward the top.

If you want to clear that knowledge, you just push this button right here.

I think this top result keyword latching is actually a really great feature and definitely recommend keeping that turned on.

If you have notifications turned on with Alfred, there's a couple of settings for that.

If you work in a corporate environment and you need a proxy for your workflows, you can turn this on.

You'll know who you are.

Selection hotkeys-- when you select something for the clipboard in Alfred, it replaces the existing clipboard contents.

But if you want, you can change that and have it restore the clipboard when you're done with it.

I don't do that.

The force keyboard thing, most people will leave blank.

But if you work in two different languages and you have two different keyboards, you can force it to adopt one keyboard or the other.

We've been talking about these action modifier keys throughout the course.

The first one is just the command modifier when you run a search.

Like if I just type mail, you can see if I hit Command 3, it would select big mail.

Or Command 1 would get mail.

Command 2 would get the script.

So you get to choose what the modifier key is.

By default, it's Command.

I would not bother to change that at all.

Just get used to it.

You can also search with your default web search with Control and Return on any selected result.

You can search it in Finder with Option Return.

And you can open it in Finder with Command Return.

And we've been doing that throughout this field guide, but it's a very useful feature.

And then finally is the syncing features, which we're going to cover in another video.

I find that I don't need to change these advanced settings very much, but it is good to know that they're there and what they do.