jwdunn

How I Use Quicksilver I: Triggers

I decided to split my authoritative guide to Quicksilver into a few parts, mostly because I know I won’t go to sleep until I have posted something, and it is already 5 AM. Note that this first part won’t include triggers I have set up to run scripts. Those I’ll cover later, in their own part.

Of course, a written series demands an italicized, dramatic, recurring hook:

Quicksilver is the first program any self-respecting Mac user should install on their box. Instead of giving a general overview of its features (there are already plenty of those), I’m going to prove Quicksilver’s worth by going over exactly how I use it.

This is part one, on triggers.

Triggers

QS allows you to hotkey any action as a trigger. If I use a certain action more than three times and I have some free keys to assign it to, I create a trigger.

For Searching

These are the basics — triggers that bring up QS’s interface and ask for a text input.

• Opt-space activates the main QS interface (searches catalogued objects).
• Ctrl-space searches my iTunes collection for specific songs to play or artists, albums, genres, or composers to shuffle.
• Cmd-shift-space searches Google.
• Ctrl-W searches Wikipedia.
• Ctrl-Y searches YouTube.
• Ctrl-M searches MacUpdate.
• Ctrl-F searches IMDb.

For Launching Applications

These triggers will open the specified application — unless the specified application is already open, in which case they will bring its windows to the front.

• F1 activates Safari.
• F2 activates Mail.
• F3 activates iTunes.
• F4 activates my downloads folder in the Finder.
• F5 activates Adium.
• F6 activates Smultron.
• F7 activates MarsEdit.
• F8 activates Skim.
• F9 activates iCal.
• F10 activates Transmit.
• F11 activates System Preferences.
• F12 activates Activity Monitor.
• F13 activates ScreenSaverEngine.1
• F14 activates VMWare Fusion.

Having the applications I use most on my function keys means I use expose sparingly, ⌘⇥ (command-tab) rarely, and the dock literally only when Quicksilver crashes. I’m not joking — look at my dock (hidden by default):

The only reason Activity Monitor makes an appearance is that I occasionally need it to force quit Quicksilver because I run QS as a background application that does not show up in the “Force Quit…” menu.

For Opening Bookmarks

As I’ll get into later, I use Quicksilver to manage my bookmarks. I’ve set these triggers up so they only work when a web browser is the foremost application.

• Cmd-1 opens Facebook.
• Cmd-2 opens del.icio.us.
• Cmd-3 opens Google Reader.
• Cmd-6 opens Sports Illustrated.
• Cmd-7 opens the Best of Craigslist.

Now, let me digress for a minute to mention a great example of the small details that make me appreciate Quicksilver. Safari’s default behavior when a bookmark is opened (by mouse or hotkey) is to load the bookmarked page in the frontmost tab, regardless of what page is already open in that tab. That means that, to open a bookmark in Safari, I would have to first create a new tab so I didn’t lose my current place, and then activate the bookmark. It also means that, once I got a healthy number of tabs going, I would rather create more tabspam than find and select tabs of bookmarked pages that I have already loaded.

Quicksilver’s behavior is much more intelligent than Safari’s. When I use any of the above triggers, QS first checks to see if I already have the specified page open in an existing tab. If I do, it selects that tab and reloads the page. If I don’t, it opens a new tab and loads the specified page.

What this small improvement over Safari’s behavior means is that I save time and my computer runs faster. 15 tabs’ worth of Google Reader make Safari very hungry for RAM.

For Doing Other Useful Things

These are the remaining triggers that don’t qualify as scripts because they call various built-in QS actions.

• Cmd-space makes iTunes play or pause.
• Cmd-; makes iTunes skip to the previous track.
• Cmd-’ makes iTunes skip to the next track.
• Ctrl-E ejects my external drive.
• Ctrl-P copies the selected file(s) to the desktop of my Windows XP partition.
• Ctrl-escape activates the main QS interface with the selected file(s) as object(s).
• Cmd-opt-T activates CharPaletteServer.2

The iTunes triggers give me total control over my music without ever having to see iTunes’ unpleasant Carbon window, and CharPaletteServer is a necessity for dashes of proper length.

The trigger for moving files over to my XP partition is only a small glimpse of what’s possible with proxy objects.

Keep an eye out for part two, on scripts.