For myself:

With Alfred and a well-tuned Quicksilver, I can:

  * hotkey it open
  * punch in the minimum to identify the application I want (usually 1 or 2 keys, 3 for rarely-used ones)
  * hit enter

and be done with it in well below 1/2 of a second.

With Spotlight, I can:

  * hotkey it open
  * punch in the minimum to identify the application (over 2x more, almost all the time)
  * wait for it to update
  * it shows the wrong application / the last movie I played and finally displays the 3rd+ letters I typed
  * wait for it to update again
  * double-checking that it's the right application (it frequently isn't)
  * hit enter
  * hope it doesn't update *again*, causing me to launch the wrong application

the whole process typically taking >2 seconds nearly all the time, sometimes 5+ if it's a less-used application.

Quicksilver in particular has a nice 'open with...' method which gives you a couple keystrokes to pick the file, 'ow<tab>' to open with, and a couple keystrokes to open it in the application of choice, all generally in less than a second. Alfred might have something similar in the PowerPack (paid), but I haven't purchased it.

Strange, I've never found Spotlight to be that slow or frustrating. I just tried it again to be sure I wasn't kidding myself, and find that I type about 3 keys, and then there's the app I want by the time I'm finished pressing the 3rd key.

It's speedy for the first few months, but once I build up a few dozen gigabytes of documents it starts to slow to an absolute crawl. Useful when searching for documents, absolutely, and faster than alternatives. But worthless for applications, which I open far more often than the average document (from a launcher, that is).

But that might be because my .Spotlight folder is > 1 gigabyte. And that's smaller than it has been in the past - my previous hard drive had it larger than 2 gb if I remember correctly, because I had tweaked it to index my source code. On my wife's computer it's only about 400 meg, and it finds applications in about a second (still much slower than Alfred or Quicksilver).

Seems like a simpler alternative here is to disable Spotlight indexing on everything but Applications and System Preferences. First thing I do on a new Mac.

Thereby losing all search for and within documents, when faster alternatives for the most-common action exists? It's a tradeoff I'd never make, but it makes sense, and then it'd probably be lightning-fast.

Makes sense for me, but I don't really have "documents" - not on the filesystem anyway.

Definitely depends on your usage patterns :)

Unless of course you have an SSD. With an SSD, Spotlight is easily fast enough to work well. To start XCode, I hit CMD-space, xc, enter, with a split-second pause before the enter. That is enough for Spotlight to catch up to my typing and I am about as fast as Alfred or Quicksilver for opening apps.

To add to Pewpewarrows' comment, I'll give you a couple of examples of things I do with QuickSilver.

I can never remember the IP address of my work's VPN, so I created a text file on my desktop with the IP as its name. Whenever I need it, I do: Ctrl+Space, ~/Desktop/[IP] to select the file, '.' to treat the filename as text, tab to go to the action part of QuickSilver, start typing "clipboard" and when "Copy to clipboard" shows up, I press enter. It can sound like a lot of steps but it gives me the IP address in my clipboard without reaching for the mouse, without having to open a file or an app.

I also use it for the integration with the address book. I type the name of the contact, select a phone number, tab to the action part and type "skype" to start calling with Skype. Or I would copy it to the clipboard to put in Google Maps…

If you've never used QuickSilver, that might sound too complicated for not much benefits, but it's something you learn over time. And it's not perfect either: I often time use Spotlight as well. (mostly for dictionary and calculator, though I'm sure QuickSilver can do it too :))

> I can never remember the IP address of my work's VPN, so I created a text file on my desktop with the IP as its name. Whenever I need it, I do: Ctrl+Space, ~/Desktop/[IP] to select the file, '.' to treat the filename as text, tab to go to the action part of QuickSilver, start typing "clipboard" and when "Copy to clipboard" shows up, I press enter. It can sound like a lot of steps but it gives me the IP address in my clipboard without reaching for the mouse, without having to open a file or an app.

If you don't mind a bit of drag and drop, a text clipping [1] may be even faster... simply drag the IP address text to the desktop, then drag it back when you want to pull it back in... text clippings make your desktop into a super-clipboard (only downside is the resulting files don't sync over dropbox)

Though I'm mostly-keyboard, I use the mouse where it makes sense, and OSX's drag and drop is a huge time-saver.

[1] http://macstarter.com/2011/01/21/text-clipping/

Quicksilver is one of those things like learning Vim or Emacs (though less complex), where the not-so-gentle learning curve gives way to a ton of functionality at your fingertips.

QuickSilver: just works, and selects correct thing you might be looking for. Spotlight: is slow, show all kinds of crap you are NOT looking for. To add insult to injury it also requires typing way more characters to get a hit, and requires several keypresses to select that item, not just return.

Z does for cd what QuickSilver does for the Finder. It's totally awesome: https://github.com/rupa/z

It's really just Spotlight on crack. Once you've done your initial search and the file/app/whatever is highlighted, you can then proceed to instantly perform actions or scripts on it. It's basically just a really nice macro feature baked into Spotlight with a new UI.

Alfred goes a step further with a built-in keyboard-based file browser, web/custom/fallback searches, email, iTunes, clipboard, Terminal, and System integration, and best of all extensions. I can't imagine using OS X without it.

I love being able to assign hot keys to apps in Alfred. I have 4-5 apps that I use 99% of the time and now I have hot keys to easily bring them up and jump between them.