Random Destiny

Here is part two of the tweaks and configurations you’ll need to make to Quicksilver to make it a productivity powerhouse. The focus here is on the bare bones steps to get you up and running so you can see what all the Quicksilver hype is about because the program doesn’t come with a lot of the features preconfigured to work off the bat. Click here to see part 1.

6) Calculator
- In Plugins: Install the Calculator Module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.” + “=” + <the equation>
- The period enables free text mode (ie it won’t try to find files
and applications while you type) and the equals sign puts in in
calculator mode.

7) Dictionary
- In Plugins: Install the Dictionary module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.” + <the word>
- Tab over and start typing “dictionary”

8. Address Book Contacts and sending E-mails
- In Plugins: Install the Apple Address Book module as well as the
Apple Mail, Entourage, or Gmail module depending what you use
- Open Quicksilver and type the name of the recipient
- Tab over and start typing either “Email” or “Compose”

9) iCal
- In Plugins: Install the iCal module
- Open Quicksilver and enter: “.”
- Enter the name of the event and time information. iCal is pretty
smart and can decipher the key date and time info as long as you
keep to standard date formats

10) Proxies- Access to all menu items from the current application
- Insanely powerful feature. Most of the time you don’t know
keyboard shortcuts but you know pretty much what the name of the
menu item is that you want. Now you can just start typing that
in Quicksilver to call up any action in the program you’re in.
- In Quicksilver preferences
- In Preferences: Enable Advanced Options
- In Plugins: Install “User Interface Access+” module
- In Catalog>Quicksilver: Check Proxy Objects
- In your Mac System Preferences > Universal Access: Check “Enable
access for assistive devices”
- Open Quicksilver and type “Current Application” + Tab + “Menu bar
items”. If the corresponding commands show up, you are set up.
Hit tab again and type a command to issue your first proxy
command.
- The final step eliminates the need to have to type the last two
commands every time by creating a trigger.
In Triggers > Custom: Create a new trigger for this sequence (it
should have the last action prepopulated when you create a new
one) and create a hotkey for the trigger (I use option+space).

* Bonus tip: Bookmark Training
- First, I recommend bookmarking all the sites you go to most
often. If you’re like me, you probably never bothered to
bookmark google.com, and other sites that you go to so often you
don’t even bother to bookmark. Having these in the system makes
it much more powerful.
- Go through the sites you visit the most and try calling them up
by starting to type their names in Quicksilver. A lot of them
probably won’t be the first result. You need to train them to be
the first result by selecting them one or two times.
- After doing this, you’ll be able to pull up any page instantly.
You’ll never want to even click to open your browser.
- *Note: You’ll want to rescan your catalog whenever you add a new
bookmark by hitting cmd+R to make sure it shows up.

* Super bonus tip: File/Text grabbing
- Now you can select a file or text and literally grab it right
into Quicksilver. Uses include picking a file and sending to
someone, selecting a URL and opening it, selecting a phrase and
sending it to a Google Search.
- In Preferences > Extras: Check “Pull selection from front
application instead of Finder
- Select some text or a file
- Open Quicksilver and hit cmd+G and the selection should show up
in Quicksilver
- *Note- it seems like it won’t grab text from some non-cocoa apps
like Firefox

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