Quicksilver - act without doing - Part 1

December 30, 2008 by Sukrit Dhandhania

Anyone who been using a Mac for some time now would be aware of Spotlight, the search built into the Mac OS. Spotlight allows you to search for a document, software, pretty much anything on your computer and open it. All this without having to open Finder and navigate through the directories to find what you are looking for. Spotlight is pretty cool. And although it’s not fair to say that Spotlight has some limitations, Quicksilver does something similar with a lot more options, and is way cooler.

Let’s check it out. First download and install Quicksilver from the project’s website. Click on the Quicksilver tab and download the latest beta release disk image. Quicksilver has been in beta for a while now, so don’t worry about that too much. After the download completes all you need to do to complete the installation is to copy the file into your Mac’s Applications directory.

Now comes the fun part. Double click on Quicksilver in your Applications directory to launch it. This will launch the Quicksilver configuration wizard window. At this point let me add that Quicksilver probably has the coolest interface for configuration wizard that I have ever seen. Go through the steps and allow Quicksilver some time to scan your hard drive and create a search index. Quicksilver ships with very few plugins installed, but during the installation you will see some suggested plugins. Click on any of them to install, if you like something. We’ll get to the plugins later.

One very important part of Quicksilver is the keyboard shortcut used to launch it. By default this is set to Control + Space. I like to use the default option. if you want to change that you can do that using the wizard, or later using the configuration window.

After the initial configuration is complete you will be presented with a screen that looks like the one in the picture below.

Test it out by typing for something. For example, if you want to launch the Terminal application, start typing the word “terminal”. Quicksilver should auto-complete the word before you are done typing it out. Hit the Return key after that. There you go, the Terminal application has been launched for you.

Quicksilver can do a lot more than just launch applications. Let’s try something more complicated. We will now open a text file with text editor of our choice. Say you have a file on your computer called “work_plan.txt” and you want to open it in the text editor Text Mate. Hit the key combination “Control + Space” to launch Quicksilver. Now search for “work_plan.txt”. Don’t hit the Return key just yet. Hit the Tab key to switch over to the second tab. Hit the down arrow key.

Use the down arrow key to select the “Open With…” option. This will launch a third tab suggesting an application with which to open the file. If you do not want to open the file with this application hit the Tab button once again. Now begin typing the name of the application you want to open the file with. For example, it could be TextEdit.

Now hit the Return key to complete the process. There you go, your text file opened up using TextEdit.

It all might seem a little overwhelming and complicated right now. Give it some time and practice. Before you know it Quicksilver will become second nature to you. I suggest you play with the features of Quicksilver I shared with you today for a few days. What I’ve shared with you is just the tip of the iceberg. Quicksilver can do a lot cooler things. I’ll return with more tips in part 2 of the Quicksilver guide.