Quicksilver is " A unified, extensible interface for working with
applications, contacts, music, and other data." I have been using it for a little while just as an application launcher but in the past week I've really unlocked some of it's power just by tweaking the preferences and installing a few plug-ins. I thought it would be a good idea to document these somewhere, my opensourcemacintosh blog would usually be the place I do this but as I'm not totally sure that quicksilver is 100% open source so I thought I would record it here.
First off, the basics:
The easiest way to get into quicksilver is to use it as an application launcher, which it can do very easily with the default settings. Simply, download and install and go through the set up process. Once quicksilver is running you can then evoke it with a quick key combination. I believe the default is control-space bar but for some reason, I changed this to alt-space bar...I forget why. Once you have quicksilver visible you will notice that it has two panes. If you go ahead and start typing the name of the application you want to launch, it will guess what you wish to run. Once you have typed enough to be able to see the application you want to launch, you can simply press return. Boom, your application is launched. This saves all that unnecessary mousing around to find the app in the finder.
Some other simple actions it can do are browsing and launching of files. If you start typing the name of the folder you wish to access in the first pane you can then navigate back and forth through subfolders using the arrow keys. Once you have found the file you want you can launch it. Not only this, you can use the second pane to perform a plethora of other actions to the file e.g. move it, copy it, get info, move it to trash and loads more.
Now where it starts to get even more interesting is when you start adding AppleScript into the mix. You can write AppleScripts and by placing them in Library > Application Support > Quicksilver > Actions folder, you can access these in the second pane too.
An example of this that I implemented was a script to send some text to twitter, although this script I downloaded from the internet.
This leads me on to another useful feature, which is using the full stop button. If you evoke quicksilver and press the full stop button you can then type text directly into the first pane, then using the second pane do a wide variety of actions to it. One useful action is adding this text to an iCal event or to do, although you do have to make sure this plug-in is installed.
I have still only scratched the surface here. There are quite a few good blogs out there for more tips and tricks, one that springs to mind immediately is 43 folders by Merlin Mann. Also the quicksilver built in docs are very useful.
All in all this application can increase your work flow tremendously. I will hopefully post some more tips as and when I come across them.