Alfred not working on Mac: what to check

The hotkey does nothing. Or the window appears but snippets refuse to expand. Or file search returns everything except the file that is definitely there. These look like different problems and they get treated as different problems, which is why troubleshooting sessions run long.

There are really only six places where this breaks, and they have a natural order. Checking them from the top costs a few minutes each. Starting from the bottom, which is what usually happens, means reinstalling before establishing that a keyboard shortcut was assigned to Spotlight all along.

Establish the version before anything else

The Update tab reports whether a newer build exists. This is not a formality. The published change log shows a release on 15 September 2025 specifically prepared for macOS 26 Tahoe, followed by fixes on 6 October 2025, 9 December 2025 and 1 April 2026, the last of which addresses a window rendering quirk in Tahoe when multiple desktop spaces are in use.

That pattern matters for diagnosis. Symptoms that started right after a macOS upgrade have a strong prior: the app predates the OS it is now running on. Ruling that out first is cheap, and it prevents an hour of permission archaeology on a problem that a build number would have explained.

While the version is on screen, note where the app was obtained. The developer states that the copy on the Mac App Store is version 1.2 and is no longer updated, and that current builds have shipped exclusively from the developer's site since Apple changed App Store requirements in June 2012. An App Store installation is not a slightly older version. It is a different era of the product.

The hotkey does not fire

If the window never appears, the first suspect is the key combination being claimed elsewhere. The developer's guidance for the Command and Space combination names two places in System Settings to check, both under Keyboard, then Keyboard Shortcuts:

• Spotlight. The menu shortcut there uses the same combination by default and must be disabled to free it.
• Input Sources. On any Mac that has ever had a second keyboard layout added, language switching may hold the combination.

There is a third case worth knowing about, because it looks like a bug. Even with both of the above cleared, macOS can hold the combination in reserve behind the scenes. The documented workaround is to go into Input Sources, set the relevant shortcut to something other than Command and Space, and depending on the macOS version, temporarily enable a feature's checkbox in order to change its combination before unchecking it again.

Hotkeys defined inside workflows fail for different reasons and need a different checklist. Confirm the workflow is enabled rather than greyed out, confirm the hotkey object is actually connected to the action object, and open the hotkey's sheet to check whether anything has been dragged into Related Apps, which restricts when it fires. Reusing one combination across two workflows is generally prevented, but it becomes possible while one of them is disabled, which sets up a double firing surprise when the disabled one gets switched back on.

The app is running but there is no way in

A specific and disorienting state: the hotkey has been forgotten and the menu bar icon was hidden at some point. Nothing on screen indicates the app is running, and nothing responds.

The documented way back in is to open the Applications folder and double click the app, which brings up its window, then press Command and comma to reach preferences. Typing preferences into the window also surfaces a result that opens them. To restore the icon, go to the Appearance tab, click Options at the bottom left, and uncheck the option that hides the menu bar icon. The default hotkey, for anyone who never changed it, is Option and Space.

Worth noticing here: hiding the icon was a deliberate choice made earlier, probably because the menu bar was crowded. The app ships that setting precisely because that problem is common. It is also the reason this particular failure mode exists at all, which makes it a good moment to think about whether hiding icons one app at a time is the right approach.

Keystrokes are not reaching it

Snippets that never expand and a clipboard history that stays empty are almost always permission problems. macOS does not let one app observe another app's keystrokes or drive paste operations without explicit approval.

The sequence to work through:

• Open the General tab and use the button that requests permissions. It opens the relevant macOS settings pane directly.
• In Privacy and Security, under Accessibility, confirm the app is listed and its checkbox is ticked.
• If it is already ticked and still nothing works, quit the app, remove it from the list, add it back, and relaunch. The developer notes that macOS can corrupt these entries, particularly after a major OS upgrade.
• If Accessibility alone does not resolve it, grant Input Monitoring from the same pane. That permission has existed since macOS 10.15 Catalina.

When permissions are correct and expansion still fails, one more mechanism is in play:

While Secure Input is locked by a process on your Mac, no other app can see your keystrokes and therefore, snippet keywords won't expand to the full snippet.

The Snippets preferences show a red warning naming the process responsible. Quitting or relaunching that app clears it. When the name shown is loginwindow, the app was unable to identify the real culprit, which often means macOS itself left secure input enabled after a login or a password prompt following wake; logging out fully or restarting resolves that case. For a recurring problem, the suggested method is to quit browsers first, wait ten seconds, and watch whether the warning disappears, since browser extensions are a frequent source.

One separate detail catches people out. Clipboard history ships disabled for privacy reasons, so granting permissions alone does not turn it on. It has to be enabled under Features, then Clipboard, by ticking the retention checkbox for each clip type. Copies made from apps on the ignore list, which includes password managers by design, will never appear regardless of settings.

Search returns nothing useful

When files do not turn up, the cause is indexing, scope, or keyword usage. There is a built in diagnostic for exactly this, reached through Help, then Troubleshooting, then File Search Troubleshooting. Running it and dropping a problem file from Finder into the target area produces a specific diagnosis rather than a guess.

Around that tool, four things are worth confirming:

• Scope. Under Features, then Default Results, check that the file's location is inside the search scope, and drag in folders that are not.
• Cloud storage. Services that store data under ~/Library/CloudStorage/ frequently sit outside the default scope. The scope window has a reset option that restores a sensible default including those locations.
• Keywords. The prefixes open, find and in widen a search beyond default results, respectively launching, revealing in Finder, and searching file contents.
• Metadata. If the diagnostic reports a metadata warning or failure, rebuilding the macOS metadata index is the fix, not anything inside the app.

Contacts searching has its own quirk that gets reported as a general search failure. The 9 December 2025 release notes mention that contact search now handles multiple first names, and that using metadata for contacts search is only available on macOS 15 and earlier. On a machine running Tahoe, missing contacts are therefore a different problem from missing files, even though both surface in the same result list, and the fix for one has no effect on the other.

Result ordering itself changed recently, which explains a class of reports that sound like a regression. The 9 December 2025 release moved to requesting files from macOS in a pre sorted order and changed the default result limits to 40, 50, 75 and 100, with a setting under Features, File Search, Search, Default Order to return to the previous behaviour.

Settings do not stick

Preferences that revert after a restart, or a red message at the top of the preferences window saying something could not be saved, point at file permissions rather than at the app. The developer publishes terminal commands to repair ownership and extended attributes on the application support folder and the two preference plists in the user library.

Anyone using the sync feature has to repair the synced copy as well, since that is where the live settings actually are. Two specific pieces of guidance apply there: avoid using the Dropbox Apps folder as a sync location, and look for conflict files that Dropbox creates when it cannot reconcile two versions. A clean way to isolate this is to point the sync location at a local folder, change one setting, relaunch, and see whether it persists.

If repair does not help, the documented reset is to quit, delete the preference plists, the cache folder and the application support folder, reboot, and relaunch. This removes the licence activation as well, so have the licence details on hand first. The last resort in the published guidance is creating a fresh macOS user account and testing there, which distinguishes an account level corruption from a system level one.

Broken from the moment it was installed

If the app misbehaved from first launch, showing missing feature names or preference icons, or freezing after a few keystrokes, there are two documented causes and neither is a bug in the app.

The first is moving the bundle after launching it. Running it from the Downloads folder, declining the offer to move it to Applications, and then relocating it manually while it is running can leave it unable to resolve where its own files are. Quitting and relaunching from Applications fixes it.

The second is unarchiving the download with a third party tool. The developer names iZip and iUnarchive as examples of tools known to resolve internal references incorrectly, and the fix is to download again and use the macOS built in unarchiver.

Both causes share a useful property for diagnosis: they produce cosmetic damage inside the preferences window rather than a clean failure. Feature panels with blank names, missing icons next to settings, a freeze a few characters into typing. None of those symptoms look like an installation problem, which is exactly why they get chased through permissions and indexing first. A quick way to separate this class from the others is to check whether the app has ever worked correctly on this machine. If the answer is no, skip everything above and reinstall properly before spending time anywhere else.

What to change first

Work top down: version, hotkey conflicts, visible entry point, Accessibility and Input Monitoring, scope and indexing, then saved settings. Most problems resolve in the first three. If the trigger for all this was a hidden menu bar icon, the underlying issue is a crowded menu bar rather than a broken app, and hiding icons one settings pane at a time does not scale past the handful of apps that offer the option. The features page covers collapsing the whole row while keeping hidden items clickable, and pricing shows what that costs. The current build and system requirements are on the download page.