I was writing an email to a friend when I realized that I’d written most of a blog post I’ve been meaning to do for a while right into the email. So in the spirit of eliminating the fowl with stones deux, here’s a quick summary of the many reasons I love Quicksilver. If some of these options don’t work for you, first check Quicksilver’s “Plugins” tab in the Settings. That, and enabling “advanced features” under preferences/application might be necessary for some of these tricks.
- Open Source: The first item on the list is also the most recent change as QS was Open Source relatively recently. Unfortunately, the development has been a little big fragmented, so sometimes you have to wade through the forums and find some alternate build or what-not, but I’m a huge fan of any project willing to open-source their work. And I’m sure things are even better now though I haven’t looked lately. To be fair, I’ve been using QS since before that, but it never hurts. Plus, the new license has likely helped Gnome-Do along which is convenient since I’m relying on it in Hardy Heron for some of the features I miss from QS. It’s got a long way to go, but development has been pretty solid, so I have high hopes.
- Working with contacts: When I want to email someone, I just cmd-space (I swapped the default spotlight and quicksilver hotkeys on my machine), person’s name, tab, “email”, enter. Voila. Likewise for other contact info, except instead I use the forward-slash to drill into the contact item and see the detailed results. Often times it’s nice to display an address or phone number using the “large type” action.
- Alerts: Speaking of “large type”, here’s a really sweet trick I used to use when I was at UF (not so much anymore since I can’t bring my laptop to work with me). I send myself quick little reminders. So say I want to focus on one particular task, and switch in an hour or at a particular time. I activate QS, enter text mode (use a “.”, or you can have it default to text mode when nothing else machines), tab, select large type, then do “ctrl-enter”. This does a modification on the action basically. In this case, I tab to the third field and select “run at time” or “run after delay”. You can give it natural text (like “five minutes” or a variety of formats for time) and it just works. Might require some tweaking to get the options enabled.
- File manager: I use QS all the time both as a file manager itself (move, delete, open, find, etc), but also with other dialogs. Say, for example, any time I’m in an open dialog box in any program and it’s in the wrong folder, I use quicksilver to locate the folder I want, then just drag the folder icon from the left pane of quicksilver straight into the open dialog box. Poof, I’m looking at the right directory. Same applies to working with files as well — if I need to move a file into a different directory, use QS to find the new directory, then just drag the file straight into the folder in the QS panel. Incredibly handy once you get used to working with QS objects like that.
- Calculator:
<CMD>-A . 40+38*33 (or other formula) <tab> calc <enter>
Result! (for an added bonus: tab, copy to clipboard, or use the “paste” action which uses the paste function of whatever program you’re into dump the result).