Setting Up Quicksilver’s 10 Most Useful Features Part 1

If you don’t know what Quicksilver is, go to the Quicksilver homepage to download and see this excellent introduction at Lifehacker.

So you’ve started dabbling around with Quicksilver, launching applications and opening files. You know it’s supposed to be able to do so much more, but you’re not sure how to get to all that cool stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of that cool stuff is dead simple to use, it’s just that Quicksilver doesn’t come with a lot of the cool stuff configured. It’s not helped by the fact that there’s a lot of posts with great usage tips and tricks but they usually fail to explain all the setup and correct preferences to get the features actually working.

So here I will outline the 10 applications of Quicksilver than I think are the most useful. These 10 probably account for 90% of what I do with Quicksilver. The focus will be on actual set up instructions rather than details about what the feature does or how to use the feature.

The first two items are super basic, just including them to be comprehensive:

1) Application Launcher- the most basic Quicksilver task
- Type the name of any application and hit enter

2) File finder- another super basic task
- Unless you keep all your files in the standard Mac folders,
you’ll probably want to go to Catalog > Custom and hit the +
button and add other folders to make sure they show up in the
search results.
- For newly added files, you’ll need to rescan your catalog by hitting
cmd+R before you search. This is because Quicksilver caches the
index of your drive. That makes it faster than Spotlight, but
sometimes misses files you just added.
- I recommend Quicksilver over Spotlight for file searching. It’s
faster, it learns what you pick as your first choice on files you
grab a lot, and you can perform a multitude of actions on the file
(rather than just open).

Now here’s the juicy stuff:

3) Google Search (and many other search products)
- In Plugins: Install the Web Search Module
- In Catalog > Modules: Check Web Searches
- Open Quicksilver and type “Google Search” and tab over to enter
your search query

4) Bookmarks
- For Firefox
- In Plugins: Install Firefox Module
- In Catalog: Make sure Firefox is checked
- For del.icio.us
- In Plugins: Install the Social Bookmarks module
- In Catalog: Add a new Social Bookmarks item from the “+” menu
in the bottom
- Hit the info button after adding the item and enter your
login info

5) iTunes control
- In Plugins: Install the iTunes module
- In Triggers > iTunes: Check Next, Previous, Pause/Play, and
Search iTunes
- Then click on the button icon for each and add a hotkey. I use:
- opt + cmd + left/right for Next/Previous
- opt + cmd + down for Pause/Play
- opt + cmd + up for Search