Alfred Workflow

In my opinion Alfred 3 is a very handy tool for macOS that boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. One of its core functions is the ability to use and create so called workflows – plugins to get even more things done.

Two years ago I thought it would be nice to have a workflow to easily access a bunch of symbols that have no shortcuts on keyboards. Now with the latest release and the help of Frank Rausch and his coding skills we’re proud to present you Special Characters — a workflow to search for special characters and to paste them in the frontmost app.

Setup

Firstly you need Alfred 3 with a Powerpack licence. Secondly you’ve to download the latest release directly from GitHub*, unzip and install (double click) the workflow while Alfred is running in the background.

↓ Download Typefacts Workflow

Thirdly launch Alfred and type “tf” in the appearing window. That starts the workflow and is necessary all the time you want to use it. After that you’ll see a list of all characters available.

Usage

By adding a keyword like math, prime, quote, space, exclamation, …, just the relevant symbols appear — with their unicode-values underneath. Navigate to the character, press Enter and in a blink of an eye it’s in the frontmost app. In addition you can press alt while selecting the character to copy the Hex Unicode or press cmd to copy the html Entity.

*What you get is a zip archive that includes the source code too.