Any serious Mac user has at some point in their workflow been touched by Quicksilver. Back in the days of Tiger, you pretty much had to use Quicksilver, without which you couldn’t even launch apps without having them in the Dock. Leopard got better with app launching, and soon the interest in QS started waning. Blacktree stopped developing the app, made it open source, and the last update was sometime no one even remembers.

A few days ago I was informed that a new update to QS is out, so what better than to write a post about what’s possible with this stunning workflow enabler.

Even without customising QuickSilver, it’s ready to work. Just hit the global shortcut you set while installing, and start typing away. Results show up 10 times faster than spotlight. Want to launch a file in your documents folder? Type in “docu…” and wait for the results pane to show up. Hit the right arrow key, and navigate through those files. If you know the name of the file, you can type in that name, and get it selected in the target window. Hit enter to launch. Quicksilver also ‘learns’ from your past choices, so it will automatically select Photoshop on hitting “p” if that’s what you constantly launch. In fact, once you’re sure of the first choice, you can press and hold the key to launch the file/action.

To perform an action other than opening (or the default for that particular file type), tab into the “Action”, and hit the right arrow key to see available actions. You can delete, rename, move, “Open With…” and (with plugins) perform a whole set of actions. Once you’re familiar with what actions are available, you just need to type in “del…” instead of searching for it in the actions pane.

Quicksilver can also be used as a file manager. Sort of. Unlike Spotlight, QuickSilver doesn’t index every bit of data on your hard drive. It won’t drive through and grab the names of all your folders, nor the contents of your text files. It also expects you to know where things are. So, you have a bunch of movies in your movies folder you want to copy to a flash drive. Launch QS, type in “Movi…” to bring up the Movies folder. Once in there, type in the name of the movie in question. Hit comma (,). This allows you to tack on additional files for the action. Type in the name of the next movie. you can even navigate into another folder if you want. Once you’ve collected your files, hit tab, “Copy…”, and then type in the name of your flash drive.

Let’s get to the plugins now…

Open up the QS preferences » Plugins, and go through the list. ‘Check’ to install plugins that interest you. There’s even a bunch of different user interface ‘modules’ in there. Each of these modules have a slightly different way of using them, which you’ll intuitively get to know once you understand the whole philosophy behind how QS works. There’s even plugins outside of the QS database, like this Remember the Milk http://www.binaryminded.com/qsrtm.html plugin for instance.

iTunes module. This is a great and quick way to play music. From the main QS interface, simply type in “Arti…” to bring up the artists list. You can then type in the artist in question, navigate to the song, and play it. But that’s the long way. With QS you can set ‘triggers’ for separate actions. I’ve set Opt+Shft+A to bring up “Artists”, so when I hit that, all I need to do is type in “Cold…” and hit enter to start playing tracks of Coldplay. I’ve got a separate trigger for Songs, and Playlists. You can even have triggers for specific actions, like for instance pausing and playing a track.

Setting up triggers is easy. To go the QS Preferences » Triggers, and add a new trigger. If you’ve installed the iTunes module, the iTunes triggers will be listed separately. Checkmark the ones you want to execute. Then click the “i” icon at the bottom to bring up the info. Set a hotkey, and you’re done.

Here’s something that behaves much different from the rest of the modules. Clipboard. I had reviewed a bunch of clipboard viewers, but it didn’t strike me that QS can serve as an excellent clipboard manager. First, install the Clipboard module. Then, in the QS Preferences, select the Clipboard tab, and check mark the ‘Capture History’ setting. Now when QS is active, just hit Cmd+L to bring up the palette. It should show you a tall window without much going on. Copy a few text clips from here and there, and you’ll see them adding up. You can also access the clipboard items by typing in “Clipboa…” for to bring up the Clipboard History right within the QS interface.

Here’s another trick. If you move the window to the edge of your desktop, it will disappear leaving a faint line along the edge. Moving your mouse cursor to that position will spring it out, effectively making it one superb clipboard manager.

Text Manipulation is another great feature. You may use one of those ‘anything buckets’ like Yojimbo or Evernote, but for simpletons, it’s sometimes necessary to have a single text file containing randomness. This is a great way to have a ‘todo.txt’ file displaying a list on your desktop that you can instantly add stuff to. Install the Text Manipulation module. Then, type in your todo.

In QS, to type in text, you hit the . (period) upon launch. So, launch QS, type in your todo, tab, “Appe…” to bring up the Append to… action, tab, navigate to the file in question, hit enter.

Here’s a random one that’s real handy. If you want to display a message on your screen while you’re away, simply hit ., type in your message “Don’t close my tabs!”, and making sure “LargeType” is selected in the action, hit enter.

One of the best plugins for QS is the Shelf module. It’s a sort of a more permanent clipboard, but less permanent than a folder. Get your content in the first pane; it could be anything from a file, bookmark, or arbitrary text. Tab, and select “Put on shelf”. Once you’ve added some items to your shelf, it’s time to access them. Type in “Shelf” as your first action, and hit the right arrow key. From there you can perform any other action on those temporarily shelved items. You can even set a trigger for it. Better still, you can hit Cmd + Option + S, to bring up the Shelf in a palette similar to the clipboard. This even allows you to delete stuff from the shelf. [Note: I haven't been able to get the shelf to function properly in Snow.]

A customised ‘cube’ interface, which is available in the plugins folder. This image is via Macrumors.

Like I said earlier, you can add different skins to QS, some of which are available in the plugins list. While there aren’t all that many third party skins, Julius Eckert created two stunning pieces of work, both based on Core Animation for some fancy superfluous effects. They aren’t all that heavy on the CPU, but they aren’t lightning fast like the stock ones.

[tweetmeme] Lastly, QS is a complex ‘organism’, that needs to be understood before you give it up. If you’re already a QS user, I can say the new version is far more stable on Snow Leopard (although not stable enough). If you’ve never attempted QS, I’d highly suggest you do. If you have any QS tricks or workflows, we’d love to hear them.

[Big thanks to @Ian_Wright for the heads up]