January

Ok so maybe no small children were eaten but Quicksilver is a very impressive app. I finally decided to give it a try a couple weeks ago and I'm still playing around with all the features. It took about three days until I could drop Butler and now I'm using QS exclusively. I had most of my Butler functionality set up within minutes. Triggers (keyboard shortcuts) for sleep and logout were a snap (using the extra scripts). The only difficult part was getting the clipboard history (pasteboard) to show up. I enabled the plugin but had to refresh the catalog for the Shelf & Clipboard. (UPDATE: Apparently you need to access the shelf and the clipboard before you can catalog them and use them via the QS menus. To do this, go to the QS menu -> Plug-Ins (underneath help) and then open them up) The last piece for me was getting custom pasteboards working again. This is where the shelf comes in handy. You can create a text clipping and send it over to the shelf for safe keeping and then access it via the QS menu (or via a trigger for the Shelf which I also have set up).

The possibilities really seem limitless for this app. I keep running into more and more excellent tips and tricks. Here are some links to help you on your merry way.

• Howard Melman's manual for QS.
• Nick Santilli over at The Apple Blog has been doing some good writeups and screencasts on the subject.
  • Screencast of how to get started from scratch (this one is a little old but gives you a good idea of how to get rolling)
  • His latest was a really simple but effective tip about using Quicksilver and the Finder together.
  • Screencast about the Clipboard features
  • Screencast about how to use the catalog
  • Another screencast about using scripts
• If you are feeling really geeky/social you can use Twitter + Quicksilver
• An enhanced iCal event and todo creator write up over at Hawk Wings

I have also been busy hacking away trying to make QS do my bidding. I wrote a little script that can open a terminal in iTerm for me based on my bookmarks. I've run out of sensical ctrl + cmd shortcuts so this fits the bill nicely. Now all I do is invoke QS, type single quote to go into text mode, type my bookmark name and then tab over to select my 'iTerm Tab.scpt'. Here is the code for the script. Just copy it and paste it into a file and save it as 'iTerm Tab.scpt' and put that script into your '~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions' folder (create it if it doesn't already exist)

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
	on process text thetext
		if thetext is "" then return 0
		
		tell application "iTerm"
			activate
			-- talk to the first terminal
			tell the first terminal
				launch session thetext
			end tell
		end tell
	end process text
end using terms from