jwdunn

How I Use Quicksilver III: Plugins

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 three, on plugins.

If cool Quicksilver plugins are your thing, googling will reveal that most nerd blogs have already catered to you. I’m going to avoid my own “top plugin” list and instead write about exactly how I use a few choice plugins. The way I see it, the tricky part isn’t downloading and installing QS plugins, but knowing how to take advantage of them.

Social Bookmarks

After I became a fairly hardcore del.icio.us fan, I realized it was sort of silly to keep a few local bookmarks specifically so I could access them using Safari’s hotkeys (Safari will assign the leftmost bookmark in the bookmarks bar to command-1, the second to command-2, and so on).

Enter the Social Bookmarks plugin, which indexes my del.icio.us bookmarks — making them accessible as triggers or from the standard QS interface. The beauty of this plugin is that it takes all of the pain out of storing data in the cloud: my del.icio.us bookmarks are now just as easy to use as locally-stored bookmarks.

The Social Bookmarks plugin also indexes tags, so if I can’t remember a certain bookmark’s title I can still find it from within QS.

The plugin works with Ma.gnolia as well as del.icio.us. If you run into trouble, make sure your account password contains only alphanumeric characters.

Fumo Interface

Ankur Kothari’s Fumo Interface is my QS skin of choice. It’s just slick.

My version is a bit different than the default. Since I really like Primer’s wider style, I opened up Fumo’s .nib file in Interface Builder and stretched out its elements.1 The interface still works fine, but now it’s much better for searching items with long names and inputting text:

Transmit Module

I use Panic’s excellent FTP client Transmit, but the trick I’m going to cover here can easily be accomplished with the free client Cyberduck and its QS plugin.

The Transmit Module allows me to index FTP locations and upload files to them with the “Upload…” action. I created a folder in my webspace specifically for random files that I need while away from my computer, and the Transmit Module makes it ridiculously easy to access.

I can simply select a file in the Finder, press command-escape to bring QS forward with the selected file as an object, and choose “Upload…” to my dropbox. It doesn’t get any easier than that — I will never email myself a file again!

File Attribute Actions

The File Attribute Actions plugin offers seven actions for, surprise, changing file attributes. “Set Icon…” and “Set Comment…” are interesting, but where I get mileage out of this plugin is with “Make Invisible (hide)”.

Certain applications — P2P programs and Microsoft Office, I’m looking in your direction — like to put their data outside of ~/Application Support/ where it belongs. When I don’t want these support files cluttering up my hard drive but I’m afraid moving them will cause their messy application to run improperly, I can easily hide them using the make invisible action. I am positive there is a terminal command to do exactly this, but it can’t possibly be as fast or as unix noob-friendly.

Image Manipulation

The Image Manipulation plugin is absurdly useful. It enables QS to change images’ filetypes and dimensions, and quite intelligently so. You can specify a percent reduction or desired width in pixels.

With Quicksilver, any action has the potential to be a batch action, so batch resizes and conversions are a snap: select some images in Finder and press command-escape to apply an Image Manipulation action to each of them. I most recently used this method to size the thumbnails for my post on useful QS scripts.

I really hadn’t planned for how many sections this guide to QS would include, but I want to write at least one more about what sort of things I keep in my catalog. Keep posted for that next installment. Considering finals are right around the corner, it probably will be some time in coming.