Stuff I’m using: Quicksilver (part 1)
Posted by: Glen in Apple, Other Stuff, Reviews, Stuff I'm usingI was asked because of this post what the big deal about Quicksilver for the Mac. Well-heh-heh-ell…let me learn you a little sumthin’….
I figured I might as well do a little quickie tutorial to get people started. You can do some searching on your own to find out little things here and there you’re trying to do.
Let’s do this thing….
First off, what is it?
Well, that is probably best answered here at the developer’s site. In a nutshell it’s a launcher…and a personal search engine (similar to Spotlight)…and a keyboard shortcut app. with a memory all balled up into one. It can take rather complex actions and condense them down to just a few keystrokes. You hardly have to ever remove your hands from your keyboard to handle your mouse.
I’m not going to go into a step-by-step walkthrough from turning your computer on to going to the site to the installation of the software and blah blah….I’m just gonna hit the nitty gritty so you know what to do when you get it. I’m also going to show you the most common actions I use it for.
Once you install the program, you will hit Ctrl+Space to activate Quicksilver. This is it’s default Hot Key to get to the screen, which will look like this:
Now, I’m pretty happy with the default hotkey configuration, but if you want to change it, you can do so through the preferences. So, lets learn our first hotkey for Quicksilver preferences:
Cmd + , (that’s a comma)
That will bring up the main preferences pane:
Once you’ve changed the activation hotkey, click on the ‘Appearance’ menu item on the left pane and find ‘Command Interface’. This tutorial is written using the ‘Bezel’ interface, but you can use Quicksilvers default if you’d like. One is horizontal, the other is vertical. Whichever suits you.
Ok, we’re gonna get to the fun stuff in a sec, but lets just do one or two more tweaks in the prefs pane to make sure it looks ok for what I want to show you.
On the top right you’ll see something called ‘Plugins’. Hit it to find something similar to this screen:
I don’t recall what is installed by default, but for the purposes of this tutorial, go on the left hand side and hit the ‘All plugins’ and select ‘Calendar’ to install the ‘iCal Module (+)’ plugin. Then, go to ‘Installed Plugins and make sure that the ‘Calculator Module’ is installed. We’ll do some more later, but this will do to get us started. Hit ‘Esc’ to get out of the prefs. pane.
Back to the main screen now….hit your Hotkey to enable Quicksilver…which will be referred to as QS from this point on. 
Here’s the fun stuff. As you type, crazy goodness happens, so don’t be alarmed if you see the other boxes populate. Just think about what you’re typing and it will become apparent what QS is doing to accommodate you.
The first box will allow you to search for and file, application, site, or function that comes to mind. Let’s start off with a simple one. Just hit the ‘~’ (sans the quotes) and lets see what happens:
QS populates the first box assuming that ‘~’ means you want to activate or do ’something’ with your home folder. Note that the first box is highlighted still and that the second box is now populated with ‘Open’. We’ll get to that box in a bit. Let’s play around with the first one for a while.
Since it’s still highlighted, you can type something else in there to change what you want to work with. Let’s type ‘pict’:
Note how with every letter you type, QS will bring up the most recent item you searched for and populate that first box. If you have yet to open anything that starts with those letters, it will bring up the most similar items (files, apps, etc) and populate that box. When I type ‘pict’, it opens my ‘Pictures’ directory.
You can use the arrow keys to move UP and DOWN in the list if the first choice QS shows you is incorrect. It will remember your selection for next time if you type those letters. Right now, I can navigate INSIDE the pictures folder if I hit the RIGHT ARROW, or I can go up and down to find all the items that have the letters ‘PICT’ associated with it and choose that one. For this exercise, I want to navigate inside the ‘Pictures’ directory. You can see I have that ability because there’s a small arrow to the right showing I can enter that directory.
Once I enter that directory and find the image I’m happy with (llamascream.jpg), I hit the TAB key to move over to the second box. The first box finds the item you want to work with. The second box chooses the action you want to do to the first item.
Once I tab over, by default, my QS shows I might want to OPEN that file. Yeah, that’ll work, but I want to see what other actions I can do to this file, so I’m going to hit the DOWN arrow to bring up a list of actions:
See how the list of actions populates while bringing up yet another box.
This list of actions can be modified through your preferences directory to add or remove what you’d like. Hit the down arrow until you find the Action called ‘Scale Image’ Once you get comfortable with the names of the actions you won’t have to hit the down arrow to find it….only type ‘SCA….’ and QS will find the action for you. Hit TAB to move to the third box.
Ok, now you have the item you want to work with as well as the action you want to do to the item. The third box in this case complements the action. You want to scale the image, so QS provides a text field to type the number of pixel WIDTH to scale it to. I’m going to use ‘150′ as my example:
Hit enter and you’re done!
You’ll find that it now created a copy of that image…followed by a number 1. If you open up the info screen for both images, you can see the differences:
To recap, I resized an image using the following keystrokes:
[Control+space] / PICT / [ ->] / [TAB] / SCA / [TAB] / 150 / [RETURN]
No opening photoshop, no mouse movements….thats it.
Believe me, this only scratches the surface of what you can do with images in QS. You can do batches of picture resizing, change the file extension, connect to your site via FTP and upload them…and TONS of other stuff with just a few keystrokes.
One more quickie fun good time trick that use all the time before I end this part…
Need to do a quick calculation? Normally you have to open your Applications folder, open Calculator, wait for it to load (which takes a surprisingly long time) and do your calculations. With QS its as easy as:
1) Activate QS (Ctrl - Space)
2) Hit the ‘=’ (sans the quotes)
3) Do your calculation. It can be somewhat complex as well. Try 35.64*25/(45+18) as an example.
You’ll see, provided you have this Action installed in your prefs, that QS assumes you want to do that calculation:
4) Hit ‘RETURN’ or TAB and RETURN if you want and it will do the calculation for you.
Pretty cool, huh?
This is such an insanely powerful little app that I can type for days and not scratch the surface of what it can do. I’m just going to provide some basics as I type these tutorials. The next one is one of my favorites.
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